Animorphs: 2010
by Lady Kino
Summary: The year is 2010 and the Yeerks have only just arrived on Earth.  Jake, a veteran in his mid-20's, must put his career plans on hold when he and his friends discover a dying alien who warns them about the coming invasion.   AU
1. Chapter 1

My name is Jake.

Sometimes. The rest of the time, it's Staff Sergeant Berenson. Soon it will be Warrant Officer Berenson, if I can keep my nose clean long enough for the paperwork to go through.

For over half my life, I've been utterly convinced that my purpose in life is to fly. Commercial planes were my vehicle of choice when I was little. My Grandpa G used to take me up in his little two-seater Cessna. The regional airport we flew out of was less than a mile from the big municipal one, and as Grandpa G taught me (unofficially) how to fly his prop plane, I would admire the larger aircraft that circled overhead. The 757s and the DC-10s, mostly. I told my grandfather with all the conviction a 10 year-old could muster that I was going to be a pilot some day.

As I got older, Navy fighter planes became my obsession. I knew without a doubt that when I grew up, I was going to fly one. I learned everything I could about them, collected models of them, read books about them. I had posters of engines on my ceiling when most guys my age had centerfolds of Pamela Anderson. I applied to the Naval Academy as soon as I got out of high school. They rejected me; in all my furor for studying aircraft, I'd forgotten that English and chemistry all those other classes factored into my GPA.

The Army took me after the Navy wouldn't and promised me a chance to go to jump school, become a paratrooper. It was the fastest way to get me into the air and I took it without ever looking back. My friends say I have a bad habit of leaping without looking. I like to tell them that free-fall is the only place I feel at home.

I still plan to fly, though. Now the obsession is with helicopters. I had a plan, a solid plan this time, for how to get myself into the pilot's seat of one.

"I don't get it. Why didn't you just do all this the first time you joined?" Marco, my best friend since childhood, didn't understand the finer points of my plan.

To give him credit, a few of them baffled me as well.

"Because I was too busy jumping _out_ of planes to fly one," I told him. "And then after that I was trying to be an officer. And in any case, that's not the point. Major Hart finally approved the packet and sent it in, so I should be out of here in a couple of months."

We were at the mall food court, the same place we'd been hanging out since we were twelve. For almost a year, I'd been stationed at a base less than an hour from my hometown, so visiting Marco had become a regular event again.

Marco leaned back in his chair, balancing it on the back two legs as he checked out girls that were nearly a decade younger than him. He'd been comically short until he hit a growth spurt in the last year of high school. Even after that, he barely breaks average. He makes up for his stature with an easy, grinning confidence, though. One which he matches with an easy, confident grin most of the time. His long hair, sharp wit, and pretty-boy face add together to make him the bane of mothers everywhere.

"We'll all be heartbroken until you return," Marco mocked.

I was about to point out that Marco had never been heartbroken over anything in his life, but that wasn't true. I'd been there the whole time Marco had to carry his dad, after his mom died when he was eleven. He knew more about that subject that he liked to let on.

"I'm sure you'll find something to distract you," I said instead, following his gaze to a group of girls sitting a few tables over. "Dude, they're like fifteen."

"Now, Jake, a fine, upstanding officer-to-be shouldn't be thinking such dirty thoughts," Marco told me, wagging one finger in admonishment. "_I_ was just observing the environment, after all."

I just rolled my eyes at him. He was impossible to argue with when he thought he was being funny. "You almost done? I've got to get up early tomorrow."

Marco looked down at the trash that was leftover from his dinner and shrugged. "You're in the army. Don't you always have to get up early?" He picked up his tray and headed toward the trashcans and I followed with mine.

"Doesn't change the facts. It's a long drive back to base."

We headed for the mall's exit, companionably silent. As we were going down the escalator, Marco suddenly jumped up to the step behind me. "Oh, shit. Pretend I'm not here."

I stepped out of the way, not about to play party to Marco's games. "Who's gunning for you this time?"

"No one. It's Tobias."

I had no idea who he was talking about until he pointed at a scrawny, sandy-blond man in glasses near the exit. He looked vaguely familiar, although I couldn't begin to guess why.

"He doesn't look too bad. I bet you could take him."

"He's not out to fight me. He's one of the new guys at the shop."

I furrowed my brows and looked at the guy again. He didn't look like a mechanic.

Marco, never one with an educational bent, had bounced around from one job to another after high school, trying out such wildly divergent careers that I was pretty sure he'd been part of every profession out there except the oldest. And some days, I wasn't even sure about that last one. For the past six months, he'd been working at a car shop, using his computer skills to work on their newer cars.

"So what's wrong with him? He doesn't look like a car guy."

"He's not. I got him the job working the front desk and now I can't shake him. Seriously, the guy has no friends. It's kind of pathetic."

I rolled my eyes and just kept walking toward the exit. The man, Tobias, looked engrossed in the advertisement he was studying, but as we pulled even with him he glanced up and locked eyes with Marco.

"Hi, Marco. I didn't know you had tonight off."

Marco plastered on a grin that looked genuine, but which I knew to be fake. "Hey, Tobias. What are you doing here?"

"Shopping." He twitched his arm, brining attention to the bag he was carrying. It had a logo from an arts and crafts store across the side. "Hey, aren't you Jake Berenson?"

I blinked a few times, at a loss for what to say. "Um, do I know you?"

"We went to high school together."

"That's...oh." High school was eight years ago. If I'd known this guy then, I'd long since forgotten him. I thought desperately for something I could say that wouldn't sound insulting. "I thought you looked a little familiar."

Behind Tobias' back, I saw Marco roll his eyes. Then he grinned wickedly at something behind me.

I whipped around just in time to stop my cousin, Rachel, from grabbing my shoulder. "Jumpy as ever, I see," she laughed. "Still haven't calmed down from your last trip to the sandbox?"

I let go of her hand but declined to answer. Rachel had never taken my career choices seriously. Then again, Rachel had the tendency to look down on everyone who didn't work ruthlessly to graduate from one of the toughest law schools in the country and then make junior partner at her law firm in only two years. She ended up looking down on a lot of people. They let her get away with it because she was leggy and blond and gorgeous. Being related to her, though, I didn't feel the need to act enthralled.

Next to her stood Cassie, her best friend. My ex-girlfriend. I'd spent an entire year in high school convinced I was going to marry Cassie, only to have a falling out with her just before graduation. If my life depended on it, I couldn't say what that fight was about. Something so insignificant and stupid that the reasons had long since faded but the awkward feelings remained. She wouldn't look me in the eye and I didn't attempt to make her.

"Hey, Rachel, Cassie." Marco stepped in to fill the sudden tense mood. "We haven't seen you guys in years."

Not exactly true. I saw Rachel most years at Christmas. And I'd seen Cassie right after my second overseas tour. Alone. In my old room, while my parents were out.

I hadn't told Marco about that and I was willing to stake everything I owned that Cassie hadn't told Rachel.

"Who's your friend?" Rachel asked, eyeing Tobias. Marco made introductions while Cassie and I stood to either side of the group, trying to ignore each other.

"Where are you parked?" Marco finally asked. "We'll walk together."

"Are you still trying that lame ladies' man routine?" Rachel made a face that on anyone else would have been a sneer. "No one here's going to fall for it."

Marco just laughed and shrugged. "Be awkward for you if we really are parked next to each other then, won't it? Are you still driving that flashy yellow mid-life-crisis of yours?"

I saw Cassie try to cover a grin, but Rachel just frowned and turned on her heel to head out the door. The rest of us followed her since, as Marco had hinted, there was only one parking lot through that exit. I fell behind the group and Cassie drifted back to join me, almost, but not quite, naturally. The silent tension between us was thick enough to cut with a knife until I blurted out, "Are you still living with your parents?"

Immediately I regretted the question, but she took it in stride. "Yeah. It helps to be close to the Center, in case there's an emergency."

The Wildlife Rescue Center used to be known as Cassie's Barn. In the past few years it had been expanded thanks to increased state funding, and now it included three shiny new buildings. Cassie and both her parents were all vets, even though Cassie had just gotten her license. Eight years seemed a long time to study to do something she'd been doing with her dad since she was old enough to walk upright, but I wasn't about to voice that thought.

I'll never know what alerted me. Probably some slight noise, or some sort of percussion effect from the ship's landing. Whatever the reason, I suddenly stopped and looked across the street. A derelict office building stood there, some doomed project that had been in construction for five years. Every few years someone bought it and then abandoned it again, until the only things consistent about the place were the homeless that squatted there and the overgrown landscaping.

The other stopped a few feet away when they noticed I wasn't followed them anymore.

"Jake, man, come on. What happened to your early morning?"

"Stay here," I told him, distracted by what I thought I saw. Something back there was _glowing_. It wasn't the normal yellow/white glow of florescent lighting or flashlights, but a blue one. I thought I heard the faint sounds of an engine winding down, but I couldn't be sure. It was like no engine I'd heard before.

I checked for traffic almost as an afterthought and jogged across the street for a better look. Every instinct I had screamed that something was wrong, and that I should find out what. Never leave an unknown threat at your back.

The glow came from around the corner of the three-story building, just out of sight. I flattened myself against the near wall and looked around the edge. There was the strange blue glow, hovering a foot off the ground for no reason that I could see. It cast strangely shaped shadows across the ground despite the fact that there were no obstacles. It almost looked like light spilling out of a door, but there was no door anywhere near it. There was nothing near it.

"Hey, Mr. Paranoid, what are you doing?"

I almost jumped out of my skin when I heard Marco behind me and I spun around to shush him. "Something's over there."

"Something like what?" Marco started to walk around the corner of the building, but I grabbed his shirt and yanked him back. Not before he saw the blue light, though. From across the parking lot, I saw Rachel, Cassie, and Tobias coming up as well. I motioned for them to stand flat against the wall behind me.

Cassie and Tobias complied, but Rachel stopped a few feet out, crossed her arms, and glared at me. I wasn't in a mood to deal with anyone's shit, so I stepped over to yank her closer to the wall. She started to protest then thought better of it, looking more worried than offended. Our family was full of women who would tan your hide for disrespect; she knew I wouldn't manhandle her without very good reason.

I held one finger up for silence and we all heard it: the sound of hooves. _Thunk. Thunk. Tha-clunk._ Whatever it was, it had an uneven gait. I risked another glance around the corner of the wall. There was a ramp descending down from the bottom of the blue glow. A four legged creature was walking down it, but all I could see were the feet.

Walking down the ramp. Down from nothing. The same nothing that cast shadows and hid the creature from view.

I flattened against the wall again and looked at the others, shaking my head slightly. I had no idea what was going on. One by one, they all stepped up to peek around the corner.

Cassie was the one who said what was on all our minds. "It's...an invisible spaceship."

If I hadn't seen it (or rather, not seen it) with my own eyes, I would have laughed at her. But as impossible as it was, it was also the most reasonable explanation. There was _something_ solid over there. Something that also happened to be completely invisible, except where it blocked out the light.

For once, Marco didn't take the opportunity to make a quip. He was just staring dumbly out into the dark. I would have given anything to have him make some joke at our expense, point out some trick of the lighting or some obvious fact that we all missed. But he had nothing.

Tobias was still looking around the corner, and after a moment he stepped away from our hiding spot, closer to the invisible craft. I noticed too late to grab him. "He's hurt," Tobias said, and we heard him take off running across the pavement.

I cursed under my breath and ran after him. Couldn't let him face whatever was over there alone, even if I had only known the guy a few minutes. Or twelve years, depending on who you asked.

The rest of the creature was visible now. Undeniably an alien. He looked like a centaur, almost, with blue fur covering his body. A centaur with no mouth and two extra eyes mounted on top of his head. Two extra eyes that were easy to miss, since everyone's attention was drawn to his tail, stretched out over his head and topped with a wicked looking blade. I kept my eyes on that tail, trying to judge how far it could reach, as I drew close to Tobias and yanked him back.

"Knock it off, he's hurt." Tobias tried to pull out of my hold, but I wasn't about to let go. Only after he'd commented on it a second time did I notice that the alien's flank was torn and streaked with blue blood, with jagged-edged objects sticking out in a few places. I knew shrapnel when I saw it. I knew wounds, too. Unless the alien kept his version of an appendix there, it was very, very bad.

Cassie gasped behind me and tried to run forward, but I caught her with my other hand, keeping everyone out of reach of that blade. An injured enemy could often be the most dangerous, the most desperate.

"We're not going to hurt you," Tobias said, still trying to knock my hand off his arm.

{I know.}

The voice sounding in my head startled me into jerking, almost pulling Cassie off her feet by accident.

{Don't be frightened. I'm not here to hurt you.}

"We're not sca- Jake let go. You're hurting me." Cassie grabbed my middle finger and yanked it back, until pain made me realize what I'd been doing. I let go of her and Tobias, but I stayed back when they both rushed forward. Sometimes you just can't stop people from doing something foolish.

The alien staggered as Cassie tried to get a good look at his wound. His back leg on that side didn't seem strong enough to hold him. Cassie reached out like she was going to try and support him, but she had no idea how to. You can't exactly offer a shoulder to lean on to a horse. "I have a kit in my truck," she said, talking too fast. Probably to keep her teeth from chattering. "I'll go get it. You just stay right here, we can fix this. I'll go and come right back and-"

{I am dying.}

Something about the way the alien said it made me relax. He sounded resigned. Accepting. Unafraid. Not at all like someone who would lash out in his last moments.

"No you're not," Tobias protested. He reached out steady the alien when he swayed again. "Cassie, go get it. We'll stay here. Or is there something we can use on your...um, your ship?"

The alien shook his head. {Don't. I am dying. You know this.} The two fixed eyes on his face were looking directly at me as he said it, though the extra two roved around the parking lot non-stop. Constant vigilance. I recognized another soldier, even one in so different a uniform.

I nodded at him very slightly to show I understood. "Can we do anything for you?" I asked, stepping forward at last.

He shook his head. {I've come to warn you. There are others, not far behind me.}

I glanced down at his bloody side. "Others like you?"

{Not like me. They have come to destroy you.}

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((A/N: I dislike ff net's system for answering questions asked in the reviews. I don't have a way of answering them in a publicly viewable format. Please direct questions to this site: www-dot-formspring-dot- me/Libby0 where I can answer them for everyone to see. Unless you don't want it answered publicly for some reason.))


	2. Chapter 2

{Not like me. They have come to destroy you.}

"Destroy?" Marco had come up behind me, though I noticed he _stayed_ behind me. "Seriously?"

{I don't have much time.} The alien stumbled again, and finally dropped down onto all four knees.

I knelt with him to stay at eye level, not sure why. It just seemed respectful. "We can get you out of here," I pointed out. "Protect you. Get you somewhere safe."

He shook his head before I'd even finished speaking. {They know I've come here. They must find me, or else they'll look for me. We don't have much time.}

I was stunned to silence. This alien was going to use himself as bait to protect us, to keep whoever was following him from looking too hard at what was going on in this parking lot. Possibly to keep them from taking their search across the street into the mall, as well.

Cassie looked about to argue, but I put my hand on her arm to stop her. "Who are 'they'?" I asked.

The alien's queer way of talking changed again. Where before I had heard words and speech in my mind, now I experienced something completely different. I somehow just _knew_ the word 'Yeerk,' but along with the word came images, ideas, vague knowledge. It was as if he'd somehow passed along a complete concept, mind-to-mind, instead of words. I saw the slug-like body and knew that it lived in a pool of sludge, that the antenna on the end were how they saw and communicated.

That they infested others and used their bodies.

Another concept followed shortly after. War. This alien, his race, they'd been at war with the Yeerks for a long time. Across decades and galaxies. Fighting for two generations. Fighting with a sense of shame that wasn't fully explained in this strange form of communication. Someone gasped at the crushing weight of the alien's sense of duty to his war, a desire to stop his enemy not matter what the cost.

{They come here,} he continued in his previous speech. {They come to enslave you, not to fight you.}

Again I felt the brush of unstated thoughts behind what he told us. 'Enslave' became a complete, specific idea without him needing to explain it. They would harvest earth for bodies, for hosts. Use humans like so many tools in their war against this alien's people. To do that, they would need us healthy and whole, not decimated by a war of our own.

The strange way of communicating, of receiving ideas that were so detailed and yet so vague at once, made my head hurt. It was like talking in a language where everything was so painfully specific that explanations would never be needed. I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead, trying to process it all at once, but the alien didn't give me a chance.

{We tried to stop them. We failed.}

I saw a great battle in space, with Mars spinning in the background. He didn't think of the red planet as Mars, but somehow I knew that's what it was. A confusing jumble of strange ships. Small ones firing green lasers. Two larger ships on the sidelines of it all. I didn't get a coherent picture of the battle, just a general sense of combat and loss. A sense of betrayal when it was realized that the Yeerks far outnumbered their foes.

My side ached suddenly, right where the alien's wounds would have been on my own body. The others must have felt the same thing. Tobias grimaced and clutched his gut while behind me, Rachel cried out softly. We were feeling the alien's race away from the battlefield. Not his retreat, but his desperate desire to get to Earth and find some last-ditch solution that he knew, with absolute conviction, would be here.

The pain passed as quickly as it had come.

{Hide now. Hurry. They're coming.}

I didn't get a clear sense of 'them' from the alien. Just a feeling of dread. A knowledge of death. Perhaps the alien didn't know himself just who was after him.

What he did give us was enough to make us all head for the building, though. I pushed Marco ahead of me and pulled Cassie behind me when those two walked too slow, while Rachel raced ahead and tried to find an unlocked door or window to the offices.

"Wait." Tobias stopped after a few feet. "Can you tell us your name?"

{War-Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.} Pride came along with his name. No arrogance. Just pride.

Rachel found an open window and we all ran for it, though Tobias hesitated a few more moments before he joined us. We clambered in the window one at a time, landing in an empty, dusty office. The interior door was ajar and Rachel ran for it, but she stopped with on hand on the knob, looking back at the window with her mouth hanging open.

I turned to look as well. Another ship was approaching, perfectly silent, also invisible except for a few lights on various points. The lights drew a vague outline of a craft about the size of a large bus, the front end in a wedge shape and the back end curved upward.

Tobias, the closest to the window stood frozen, framed by the sill and a perfect target for anyone who looked over. I motioned for everyone to get down on the floor, but Tobias stood frozen until Marco, who was closest, dragged him down.

{Visser Three.}

I was startled to hear Prince Elfangor's words, even from this distance. I felt his distaste for the name, knew instinctively that 'Visser' was a rank, a high one, and that the bearer of the name was despised beyond description.

For a moment there was only silence outside. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears and Rachel's ragged breathing behind me, but nothing from outside our office. Then the _hiss_ of an automatic door opening and the scrape of something sharp against metal, sounding vaguely like tap shoes.

{Hork-Bajir.}

I saw in my mind the creature that made the tap-shoes sound. Seven-foot tall, covered in blades, the claws on its feet _clink_ing against metal. Claws made for climbing trees but easily adapted to ripping apart foes. I knew to be afraid of these creatures, but because they were enslaved, not because they were naturally aggressive. I pitied them.

Elfangor's thoughts did not tell me why he pitied them so much, nor what kind of 'peaceful' life a being covered in blades could have led. Apparently even this abbreviated form of communication could leave things out.

Then a new sound, the sound of hooves again. These were steady, not the footsteps of an injured alien. I crept closer to the window and risked looking out again. Another alien like Elfangor faced the fallen Prince, with half a dozen Hork-Bajir and a dozen men and women in a semi-circle around them.

I reached to my thigh automatically, but my M9 wasn't strapped there. I felt a moment of panic before I realized that I wasn't supposed to have a weapon today. Crouched behind poor cover, watching an enemy converge on a friend, I felt naked without my firearm. But this wasn't Fallujah; I didn't walk around armed every moment of the day expecting an attack from all directions. Or rather, I wasn't supposed to need to.

{Tisk, tisk, Elfangor. Running from a battle? What _will_ your people say when they find out?} The 'voice' came from the new blue alien, from Visser Three. His words were clear and crisp, without any of subtly and concepts behind them that Elfangor's had. They sounded hollow and inadequate after hearing the thoughts of the Prince.

Elfangor turned one stalk eye on our window, but quickly looked away. No need to foolishly give away our position. {This is your enemy,} he told us. Somehow I was reassured that the Visser couldn't hear these thoughts. And I knew that Visser Three was in charge of the entire invasion force. Elfangor must have been very important, to warrant such a high-ranking pursuit. {He is the only Yeerk to take an Andalite host.}

I saw other Andalites like Elfangor, running in a field of pale green grass, or sitting together in a small, carved out hollow in the side of a hill. Laughing without mouths. Touching hands together. Peaceful. I felt a wave of affection for them, Elfangor's love for his people, tinged with kind of horror that anyone had violated a member of his species. I understood. It was the worst fate imaginable for this free-running species, to be a captive.

{No comment?} Visser Three asked. Elfangor's exchange with us had only taken a split second. {No heroic last words, no declaration of defiance? Honestly, Elfangor, I expected more from you than this. Quite disappointing.}

I sat back down with my back against the wall. I didn't want to see Elfangor executed on my behalf. Across the room, Rachel was inching the door open, slowly enough that the movement wouldn't attract attention.

{No matter,} Visser Three continued. {We can always add your begging for your life into the record later, I suppose.}

Rachel had the door opened enough to slip through it. I tapped Marco and Tobias on the shoulders to get their attention and pointed toward the door. Slowly, we all crept across the floor to the exit.

Elfangor's words stopped us. {Don't make a sound. But watch.}

I'd never known before that 'watch' could have so much emotion behind it. Could mean at once a desperate plea for us observe his death, to preserve the truth of his final moments against whatever lies Visser Three would spread later, and also a firm instruction that we see what the Visser was capable of. We would need to know later, need to understand if we were to survive.

Still, I didn't dare stand up. I couldn't imagine a way to tangle with one of those Hork-Bajir and come out alive at the end. Not without some weapon more powerful than whatever I could find on the ground.

I didn't have to stand up, though. Visser Three began to change. I heard it before I saw it, heard the sickening crunch and slither before I saw his body grow up past the windowsill, saw his skin twist and melt. His face grew to the size of monster truck wheel and then split across the bottom, showing large, sharp teeth in three rows. His four legs merged into two, each the size of a tree trunk. His arms thickened as well, the fingers melting together into three digits that looked like clumsy crab claws.

There was a short scuffle beside me, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the massive creature long enough to figure out which two of my friends were fighting. I clenched my hands into fists at my sides, desperately wanting to leap out the window and _do something_, anything, to help. But it wasn't possible. A tank probably couldn't fight whatever he had turned into.

{And thus ends our merry little chase, Elfangor. A shame we couldn't arrange a larger audience for your demise.} Visser Three reached toward the ground and came up with Prince Elfangor in one hand, his crabby fingers digging cruelly into his wounded side. Elfangor struck out with his tail, impossibly fast with each strike, but the Visser ignored him. Elfangor couldn't do anything besides scratch his skin. {And now you die.}

Still the Prince wasn't paying him any attention. He lashed out with his tail, but his eyes were on us. {Tell them. Tell everyone.} For once, I had no idea what he meant. About the Yeerks or about his death? Did he even know himself?

The Visser held Elfangor over his mouth, dangling him in the air for a moment, before he dropped him into those rows of razor-sharp teeth. Elfangor finally screamed then, but like nothing I'd experienced heard before. It wasn't a sound, it was a gut-wrenching, heart-stopping wave of terror and pain and loss. It was the blood rushing through my ears like a tidal wave and lights exploding in front of my eyes and vertigo and sorrow and desperation all in one.

It was over in a second. When I could see straight again, Visser Three was still chomping on Elfangor's body, blue-black blood running from the corners of his mouth while bits of flesh spewed out like crumbs. The Hork-bajir around him sent up an odd cackling sound, while the humans cheered in the more usual fashion.

Beside me, Marco began to vomit noisily. I grabbed him by the shoulder, but there was nothing I could do to quiet him until he finished. The sounds of cheering outside the window stopped abruptly.

{Search the building!} Visser Three cried. {Hurry! Fools! I don't care, just do it!}

Rachel tore the door open the rest of the way and bolted through it. Cassie was right after her, then Tobias, then me, pulling Marco. We raced down the pitch-black hallway and I prayed that there was nothing in our way to trip over.

Around a corner, we saw the glow of an exit sign, but before we could reach it someone from the outside started banging on it, trying to kick it in. The others ducked into another hallway; I pulled Marco and myself into a stairwell.

We stepped on a bum who had set up shop on the first floor landing. "Hey!" he yelled. "This is my spot! Get your own."

The exit door burst open and I shoved Marco further up the stairs. I tried to pull up the homeless man as well, but he kicked me for my troubles. I left him. Not my problem.

We turned the corner at the top of the stairs just in time to hear the man start to shout again, only to be cut off by the sharp fire of a handgun. A large caliber from the sound of it.

Marco's eyes were wide, the whites reflecting what little light came in through a window. "What do we do?" he hissed, panicking.

I clamped my hand against his mouth and pulled him off to the side of the hallway, against the wall.

"See anyone up there?" came a voice from downstairs.

"No, just the bum."

I stiffened, making Marco protest my too-tight hold on him. I knew that second voice.

"Check it anyway. Don't want anyone getting away."

As we listened to the sound of boots coming up the stairs, I tugged Marco backward into a shadowed corner next to the stairs, behind a stack of broken office chairs. It was scant cover, but the shadows would make up for it.

Just as we settled in between the trash and the wall, I saw Corporal Cleever arrive at the top of the stairs. The owner of the second voice. One of the soldiers in my company. Young, brash, and too loud for his own good, but a decent-hearted kid. He always offered to pick up lunch for me when I had to work through our break.

Now Cleever held a gun in one hand, idly point it this way and that as he poked his head into all the offices that led off the hallway. Sloppy work. Sloppy and dangerous. Not at all like Cleever, who was good at his job despite all else. He never once checked our corner, or any of the other stacks of abandoned equipment in the hall.

Marco touched my arm to get my attention and nodded toward the stairs, but I shook my head. Cleever was at the other end of the hall, but movement would draw his attention. And we still didn't know what was down there. Stupid, stupid, stupid of me to get us stuck on the second floor, but now we had no choice but to wait it out.

Eventually, Cleever finished his check of the offices and headed back down the stairs. "All's clear up here," he called as he descended.

Carefully, Marco and I left our spot and walked down to the other end of the hall, to the other exit sign and the other stairway. I led the way down the stairs, checking carefully for any signs that someone was just around the next corner, waiting to shoot us as well.

The emergency exit door was right next to the bottom of the stairs, providing us with an easy escape. I eased the door open slowly, careful not to show my body in the crack between the door and the wall in case there was someone outside waiting for me. All clear. The door opened into an ally on the side of the building.

"All clear, sub-Visser," someone said in the hallway behind is. "We found a few transients; it was probably one of them that saw us."

"I don't like _probablies_." Principle Chapman. I hadn't heard his voice in ages, but there was no way I'd ever forget it. "Search the entire building and the surrounding area."

I ushered Marco through the door and then closed it behind us as quietly as possible. Once free, we both ran for our lives out of that ally and into the night.

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((A/N: I dislike ff net's system for answering questions asked in the reviews. I don't have a way of answering them in a publicly viewable format. Please direct questions to this site: www-dot-formspring-dot- me/Libby0 where I can answer them for everyone to see. Unless you don't want it answered publicly for some reason.))


	3. Chapter 3

I slept on Marco's couch that night, despite the fact that it was far too short for me. I didn't get up until late in the morning, almost 9 am. After getting my truck and Marco's motorcycle from the mall parking lot, we'd checked on the others in person rather than risk phone calls. No sense giving away a hidden friend by making their cell start ringing. But everyone had escaped, and they didn't want to talk. At least not that night.

Neither did I. I followed Marco back to his tiny apartment, fell over on the couch, and slept poorly the entire night. Every sound made me jump to my feet, a baseball bat in my hands, ready to find one of the aliens from the office building kicking in the door. By the time I finally rolled off the couch for good, I was bleary and grumpy and still unaware of the time. I stumbled into the kitchen for coffee and had to search through all the cabinets to find any. Marco mostly had half-full boxes of sugary cereal and enough ramen to survive the apocalypse. I suspected he just disliked grocery shopping and cooking, since I knew he wasn't too poor to afford real food.

I found the bag of coffee in the freezer and had to wash out the pot before I could make a fresh batch. Marco stumbled in just as I was pouring the first cup. "The hell are you doing up so early?" he asked as I handed him the mug.

"It's late for me," I pointed out. "Half the morning's gone. I'll get yelled at when I get back on base."

I glanced side-long at Marco, wondering if he would pick up on what I'd just said. We hadn't really talked about the night before, about what we would do with what we now knew.

Marco just sipped on his coffee, scowling at the morning in general. "What are you going to tell them? 'Sorry, Sir, I was up all night pissing my pants after a bunch of aliens tried to kill me.'"

"Basically."

Marco put his cup down so fast that coffee spilled over the sides and onto his hands. He didn't seem to notice. "Come again? I did _not_ just hear you say you're going to try and sell this whole story to the army."

"Do you have any better ideas?"

"Here's one: how about we play hooky for the day and try our damndest to pretend that last night didn't happen?" He finally noticed the coffee on his hands and got a rag from the sink to clean it up. "What makes you think they'd believe you anyway?"

I was about to ask _Why wouldn't they?_ when I thought better of it. He had a point that people who claimed to be visited by aliens didn't fare well. "I'll figure something out. I'll tell them something else to get them out here to see the site and then they'll..."

And then what? Unless there was something leftover at the office building, I had nothing that would convince my superiors that aliens were really among us.

_Really _among us. I tried not to think of Corporal Cleever. Anytime I did, I refused to even think of him as Cleever. It turned my stomach to think of the boy as having one of those _things_ in his head.

"Jake, wake up. Those guys we saw last night? They knew what they were doing. Fuck, man, they had _invisible ships_. You think they left anything there for someone to find? What, you're going to show up and...and trip over an invisible manifold or something? We've got nothing. Not even pictures on your cell phone, unless you snapped some while I wasn't looking."

I glared at him, not willing to admit that he had a point. "So that's it, then? You find out there's aliens invading the planet and you want to sit back on your ass and do nothing?"

"Yeah. I want to do nothing. Because this?" He made a motion with one hand, indicating the entire situation. "This is a little bit beyond just riding the crazy train, man. This is the crazy train crashing head-on with the insanity express smack in the middle of Locotown. And there ain't nothing we can do about it."

"Nothing? You really believe that?"

"Did you SEE those aliens last night? Seven feet tall, covered in knives? If you want to tangle with those then go ahead, but I think I'd rather stay all nice and not-mutilated."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My best friend, who I'd known for my entire life, was turning his back on what we'd seen last night. On what we knew, on what we had to do now. We were, if not the only people in the world, then among the very few who knew this invasion was going on. And he wanted to just run away from all that? All because it was going to be a little difficult?

I dumped the rest of my coffee in the sink. "Fine. You stay inside and lock the doors, then. I've got to go."

Marco grabbed my arm to stop me before I could get out of the kitchen. "What are you going to tell them?"

I jerked my arm out of his grip. "I don't know yet, alright? I'll figure something out before I get there."

"You're going to leave the rest of us out of it, right?" When I just looked at him, confused, he grabbed my sleeve again. "I'm serious, Jake. If you want to go be a martyr, then that's your own head, but by god, you'd better tell them were there alone last night."

"Afraid someone will come put you in a loony bin, as well?" I still couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"Still going to be so cocky if they end up putting one of those _things_ in my head? In Rachel's? In Cassie's? Did you notice all those humans out there? You don't know how many more of them are around, and if you start blabbing your mouth off to anyone who listens, then the only people who are going to actually believe you are going to be the ones who _really_ want you to shut up. And maybe that's a chance you're willing to take, but I'm not."

I pulled away from him again and stalked out of the room. "Don't worry. I'll leave you out of it." I didn't wait for his indignant protest before I slammed the front door shut behind me.

I could barely think about what I would tell my superiors during the drive back to base. I was too wrapped up in being furious at Marco. Anger was a very convenient emotion. It let me seethe and fume and not think about the final dying screams of a shipwrecked alien Prince.

I've heard a lot of screaming in my life, and I've hated all of it. You hear something like that, feel something like that, and it tears at you. Sometimes I could deal with it. Sometimes I couldn't. I didn't think I'd ever be able to deal with Elfangor's scream.

Fortunately, he'd given me a lot of other stuff I couldn't deal with as well. But that, at least, I could lay at the feet of someone who could deal with it. I would start with my First Sergeant. 1SG Polk had been with my unit as long as I had; we'd arrived within a month of each other. He'd led us through our last deployment, and he knew I was solid. He knew he could trust me to get a job done and take care of my men, and I knew I would follow him into a burning building without hesitation. With something as incredible as this, it would take some convincing, but I knew Polk would hear me out. Once I had him on my side, we could tackle the brass together. I couldn't head to the top of the chain of command with a story like this, but I _could_ work my way up it.

I arrived on base just before 10 am, a full four hours after the start of the duty day. Most of the company was in the in the supply room, inventorying their rigging and getting ready for our quarterly inspection. A few of them called out to me as I walked past, but I ignored them, heading for 1SG Polk's office.

The door was closed when I arrived. Polk only ever closed his door when he was discussing something private with someone, usually some disciplinary matter. What I had to say was more important than Private Snuffy's latest overdue bill. I was about to barge in anyway when I saw through the window who was with him.

Polk and the company commander, Captain Hash, where both having a lively argument with Corporal Cleever. All three of them were standing, gesticulating wildly, talking intensely. I couldn't hear the words, but I backed off immediately so they wouldn't see me through the window.

I stood flat against the wall next to the door, hardly able to process what I'd just seen. That was not an argument between leaders and their soldier. If Cleever had been talking to me like that, I would have dropped him where he stood, and I knew Polk and Hash were even less tolerant of disrespect. In that office, I'd witnessed a fight between peers.

And the only way for that to be possible was if the fight was not between Cleever, Polk, and Hash, but between three completely different people.

"Hey, Sergeant." I looked over to see one of my platoon members, Specialist Rose, walking down the hall toward me. He held a stack of manila folders. "Why are you in civvies?"

I looked down at the rumpled jeans and t-shirt I'd worn the day before. It hadn't occurred to me to go home and change first. "Been a long morning," I said evasively. "What's going on with Cleever?"

Rose shrugged. "Don't know. They called him in there like an hour ago."

I watched Rose walk past, heading for the orderly room, uneasy suspicion building in my chest. How much did Rose know? Was he part of this, too? The Yeerks were _in my company_, they had taken my commanders, but how far did they spread?

I couldn't tell them about Elfangor. I couldn't even lie to them. Marco was right, that bastard, if they even suspected what I knew they'd be very interested in making me shut up about it. I realized with a start that I couldn't even jump over them to someone else, to the IG or the battalion leaders or anyone else. The first thing they would do would be to call my company commander, unless I accused them of something, and then there would be an investigation. You can't run an investigation on someone without their knowing, so Polk and Hash would have plenty of warning before the truth ever came out. And that would be the end of Jake Berenson.

The door opened suddenly, making me jump. Polk was hanging out doorway, looking at me with one eyebrow raised. "Berenson, what the hell are you doing? You're four hours late."

"Trouble at home, First Sergeant," I lied. I tried frantically to come up with something that would be believed, although it was unlikely I'd find something that would get me out of trouble. "My parents. They had to take my Dad to the hospital early this morning. He's okay, though."

Everyone knew I'd grown up nearby, and that my parents still lived there. Even so, it was a weak excuse.

"And you didn't think it was important to call back here and let us know what was going on?"

"Slipped my mind, First Sergeant."

Polk gave me a long, hard look. He clearly didn't believe me, but he looked like he was trying to decide if I was up to something sinister, or just covering a normal gaffe. Finally, he just scowled. "Go home and get changed. Be in my office first thing after lunch. Don't think you're going to get away with this."

"Yes, First Sergeant."

I turned on my heel and walked as quickly as I could out of the building. I didn't stop until I reached my truck again, and then I simply sat behind the wheel, staring at nothing. How could it be? How could a bunch of body-snatching aliens straight out of a B-movie premise take over my company and all without my even noticing?

I tried to convince myself that it wasn't true. That it couldn't be true. Surely I _would_ have noticed, and what I'd seen with Cleever in the office was just a coincidence. There had to be some other explanation for that argument, any other explanation.

But no matter how many times I tried to tell myself that, it wasn't enough to make me get out of the truck and go find out. I sat frozen to the spot, numb with shock, unable to cope with the fact that I couldn't trust my command.

The ringing of my cell phone jerked me back to the present. It was Marco. "They got my first sergeant," I said in lieu of a greeting.

"What? Fuck, man, you to- _What_?"

"I didn't tell them anything."

"I _told_ you not to go back there. I _told_ you this would happen. They don't suspect anything, do they?"

"Polk does, but I think he just thinks I was playing hookie."

"I swear, if you get me killed, I'm going to haunt your ass for the rest of your life."

"What if they kill me first?"

"Then I'll haunt you in the afterlife. That's not really the point. Look, can you get out of there anytime soon?"

"Not without a really good lie." I remembered the argument I'd seen, and the way Cleever had looked defensive. Had they been arguing about his performance the night before? "I think I need to stay here and show my innocent, unsuspecting face for a while."

"Alright, well I just got off the phone with Tobias. He wants to know if we can all meet somewhere."

"Yeah, okay. Sometime after dinner. I'll call back when I know I'm getting out of here."

"Right. Watch your back, okay? I've played poker with you, and you kind of suck at bluffing."

"Jee, thanks for the encouragement." I hung up the phone and tossed it on the passenger seat. As annoying as Marco was, at least he'd shaken me out of my shock enough to drive home. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I would need to stay calm if I wanted to get through the day with my head still attached and unoccupied.

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((A/N: I dislike ff net's system for answering questions asked in the reviews. I don't have a way of answering them in a publicly viewable format. Please direct questions to this site: www-dot-formspring-dot- me/Libby0 where I can answer them for everyone to see. Unless you don't want it answered publicly for some reason.))


	4. Chapter 4

The rest of my work day passed uneventfully. Relatively speaking, at least. We had to tear up the supply room looking for some missing gear, but that was on par for a 100% inspection; things always went missing. My meeting with 1SG Polk consisted mostly of me saying nothing and him yelling at me, but that, too, was normal. A thorough chewing out was a minor punishment, all things considered. I could tell he still didn't believe my excuse, but he seemed inclined to go along with it. If my father really had been ill, it wouldn't have taken much to get permission to go take care of him for a single morning. A call to my platoon leader would have been enough to get him to cover for me. Polk knew that, and he knew _I_ knew that. I pleaded emotional distress and took my rant without argument.

I was glad for the monotony of the day's work. It didn't take much acting to sit off to the side and count straps and fold rigging. Didn't take much brain power, either. I was able to fall into the task with an almost zen-like consciousness, carefully thinking of nothing except numbers and folding, filling out the requisite paperwork when I had to, checking over the work of those in my platoon. I was almost surprised when someone called quitting time.

I was halfway back to my hometown before I remembered to call Marco. He told me everyone else was already at Rachel's house, waiting for me to show up.

Rachel owned her own house, the only person in the group who could make that claim. It sat in the area called 'The Hills,' a tiny little two-bedroom place made hideously expensive by the location. I let myself in the side gate to the backyard, where everyone was gathered on the porch.

They weren't talking. Marco was doing something to a built-in grill that produced a lot of smoke. Rachel and Cassie sat together on a swinging bench, both reading magazines. Tobias sat at the edge of the porch, just looking. They didn't call this area The Hills for nothing; the land fell away just past Rachel's fence line and gave her a breathtaking view of both the town and the bay.

"Ah, finally! Rambo's here." Marco grinned impudently at me, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Looks like we can get started."

"What, exactly, _are_ we starting?" Cassie asked.

"A lively debate on whether or not find new and interesting ways to get in trouble? Either that or dinner. I vote for dinner."

I wandered over to see that Marco was making hamburgers. "I thought you didn't like to cook."

"Jake, Jake, Jake. There's _cooking_ and then there's _grilling_. This, I am a master at. You'll see."

I had to admit, it did smell pretty good.

Rachel just rolled her eyes and went into the house. When she came back out, she was carrying extra folding chairs. Tobias and I helped her set them up around a patio table while Cassie went inside for plates and the rest of the food. "We're not really going to just pretend like last night didn't happen, are we?" Rachel asked as we set up.

I just shook my head. I didn't have a clue what to do.

"Well, I'm not going to," Tobias insisted. I was startled to hear the intensity coming from the meek-looking man.

"Yeah, what are you going to do?" Marco asked, bringing over his plate of burgers. "Call up CNN and have them put you on 6 o'clock news?"

Tobias opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off. "Let's wait for Cassie to get back."

He gave me an odd look, but he didn't say anything. Cassie came back with plates, buns, and a Lazy Susan loaded with condiments. Everyone sat down and started to build their dinner, but the longer we went without discussing the real issue, the more tense the atmosphere got. No one looked each other in the eye. No one made idle chit-chat.

Even I didn't want to break that silence. It was our last line of defense, between the comfortable lives we had been living and the one we were about to face. We were all clinging to the idea that if no one brought up Elfangor's charge to us, then it wouldn't be real. We wouldn't have to deal with it, either to accept it or deny it, so long as we continued to ignore it. It was a thin thing to cling to, but it was hard to let go of, as well.

Rachel was the first to break the silence. "So what do we do now?" Marco opened his mouth and she turned on him faster than I would have thought possible. "And if you make one crack about food, I'm going to stuff you in a closet."

He just grinned and winked at her.

"She has a point," Cassie said softly. "We need to figure out how to proceed."

"Or _if_ we're going to proceed," Marco pointed out.

"What are you talking about?" Tobias hadn't taken a bite yet, but he used his burger to gesture.

"I'm talking about the fact that we've got nothing more than an insane story about aliens that can _fucking eat_ people and they've got...well, aliens that can eat people." He looked over at me, defiant. "And they don't exactly wear t-shirts that say 'Hi, I'm here to enslave you.'"

The rest of the group looked at me, clearly wondering what his pointed comment meant. I hadn't told any of them about Cleever yet. If they'd seen him at the office building, they didn't know who he was. I looked down at my plate with my jaw clenched, not quite willing to give up my comrades just yet. These men were my friends, more than that. We'd fought together. We'd depended on each other. I'd placed my life in the hands of all three men multiple times, and they'd done the same to me. I felt like I owed it to them to see this...this...whatever it was through myself, without dragging in the others.

It was foolish. Stupid, even. My friends had to know what they faced, and that included knowing that the Yeerks were in the military. But that didn't stop it from feeling like betrayal.

"Jake?"

"They're in my company, alright? One of our corporals - not one of mine, he's in second platoon - was at the office last night. And I think my first sergeant and commander are...you know, taken."

The news produced shocked silence from everyone else at the table. Cassie, on my left, reached out like she was going to touch my hand, but she pulled back at the last moment.

"Doesn't that make it more important than ever to do something about this?" Tobias asked.

"I'm all ears, if you've got a plan on how," Marco told him. "You know, other than walking up to people and seeing if they shoot us or have us committed. Because if we do it that way, we've only got five chances on getting it right."

"My God, Marco, why are you even here if you're just going to bitch about how impossible it is?" Rachel glared at him from across the table. "Has it occurred to you yet that if we do _nothing_ we'll end up just as dead? Or with one of those slugs in our brains?"

"Marco has a point," Cassie cut in, blocking what was likely a very heated retort from Rachel. "About us not be able to do anything with what we have. But that doesn't mean we can't do anything at all."

"Recon." I was surprised that she had to point it out first. "First thing you do before any mission. Figure out where your enemy is, how many, what they know."

Cassie nodded. "Exactly. We can't really make an informed plan if we're not informed."

Tobias brightened instantly, sitting up straighter in his chair. "We could spy on those people you mentioned, see if they lead-"

"No!" Tobias looked at me like I'd slapped him. "I mean, I'll watch them. It would look weird if you guys started showing up around the base all the time."

Marco studied me, his expression unreadable. "Jake, man-"

"Chapman's closer."

We all turned to Rachel, who suddenly looked about as uncomfortable as I had a moment ago. "I still see Melissa sometimes," she offered. "I could maybe talk to her." She clearly didn't like the idea of using her friend, and I had to remind myself that it wouldn't be a good idea to point out they'd just asked me to do the same thing.

"And Sarah's still in High School."

Rachel shot me a poisonous look. I had the feeling she would have slapped me if I'd been close enough. "Forget it. You won't even let us _tail_ your guys, there is no way in _hell_ I'm going to let you use my baby sister for this mess."

"I'm just saying that it gives you an excuse to go back to the school."

"Uh-uh. No. No. And another thing? No. Sarah does not become part of this, not even as an excuse. She's only 17; she should be worrying about getting into college, not making sure her principle doesn't attack her."

"We should all be worrying about something else," Marco pointed out. "I should be worried about paying for my new TV. Tobias should be worried about what I'll do to him if he gets paint on my inventory sheets again - yeah, I noticed that, by the way. Cassie should be worried about catching Bird Flu. We've all got stuff that we _should_ be worrying about."

"Oh, that's a brilliant line of argument," Rachel snapped. "You're right, what was I thinking? When we're done using Sarah, how about we run over to your Dad's house next and get _him_ to help us out?"

Marco looked about to launch into a full-scale verbal fight, so I cut in. "Look, there's got to be plenty we can do without involving family members, so why don't we just not cross that bridge until we have to? Although someone does need to find a way to see what Chapman's up to at school."

"I'll do it," Cassie offered. "I work with the science teacher there sometimes." When we all looked at her inquisitively, she shrugged. "We lend her some of our animals sometimes. To use in class. And we give her the ones that die for dissection and stuff."

"I thought you didn't like dissection?" I asked.

"I don't like killing animals _for_ dissection, but if they're already dead, it's a very educational practice."

"I can take him if he leaves the school," Tobias offered. "I don't have to work until the evening."

"Wait, hold on a minute." Marco pushed back from the table and folded his arms across his chest. "Shouldn't we decide _if_ we're going to do this before we start going on about _how_ to do it?"

"Looks like everyone here has decided except for you," Rachel told him.

"Marco," I said. "No one's going to blame you if you want to just step out now."

Rachel turned away from him and rolled her eyes. She would blame him.

"Back out? Are you kidding? Cassie's going to go hang out around a school all day on the excuse of an errand that should take five minutes and Tobias wants to tail the guy in a Pinto with lime green stripes on it. You guys are going to get caught in a day, and when you do, they'll find me. I'm not going anywhere. Clearly I have to stay here just to keep my ass covered."

I was about to say something, but I got distracted and turned to Tobias. "Lime green?"

He shrugged. "They came with the car. I can't afford to get it repainted."

"We finished with Mrs. Dobchek's car a day early," Marco said. "I was going to call her in the morning, but I can hold off and you can take it for the day instead. Just bring it in when you come for work."

I was surprised by Marco's offer. It was unlike him to be so quick to break the shop's rules; he had a pragmatic sense of right and wrong when it came to laws and rules, but he also really liked his job and, as far as I knew, didn't do anything that might get him fired. I was also surprised by how much sense it made. A car was easy to identify, especially if Tobias's was so distinctive, but borrowing one got around that problem nicely. I never would have thought of it.

"Um, thanks?" Tobias said.

"Yeah, whatever. Just don't get it scratched. Mack'll kill me deader than the aliens if he finds out I let you take it."

"It's so charming how you make everything all about you," Rachel sneered.

Marco made a kissy-face at her.

We spent the next several hours talking about the different ways we could use to track Chapman. No one was entirely sure how to pull surveillance on a man, so we tossed out a lot of ideas, analyzed them to death, and then racked our brains for something new. I wasn't sure how to feel about the fact that our best plans came from movies we'd seen, but there wasn't much else we could draw on. Even I didn't have any experience in the area. I was a grunt, after all, not a wirehead. I was used to getting all my intelligence handed to me in a Power Point slide.

When Marco started expounding on all the ways he could not, in fact, attach a GPS device to Chapman's car without him knowing it, I tuned out and looked out over the back fence. I'd never noticed before, but it suddenly occurred to me that our town was in a highly defensible position. The Hills gave beautiful, sweeping views, but they also made an approach from the south very difficult. The only southern road was the highway that ran right along the ocean. The northern approach was less hilly, but full of sand, which would also force any vehicles to stick to the handful of roads that went through the place. A national park to the east could easily be converted to an obstacle just by felling a few trees. The spit of peninsula that made our bay one of the calmest on the coast also protected us from an approach by sea. If it came to a fight on the ground, anyone who held the town would be able to defend it indefinitely provided they were smart about it.

Added to that, even though we were a mid-sized town at best, we were centrally located. Only an hour from a major military installation. About the same from the state capital. A day trip away from Los Angeles and several other major cities. We sat on the train lines that serviced most of the state and weren't far off from the shipping lines - even as we talked I could see enormous cargo ships heading for larger ports. The coastal scenery made us a famous tourist attraction, and we had more than a few mansions on the northern side of town; if the Yeerks wanted to bank-roll their invasion and then hide it behind 8-foot walls and private security guards, that would be the place to start.

Not bad, for a sleepy coastal town.

"Jake?"

I snapped my attention back to the present and saw that everyone else was looking at me. "Hm?"

"Still with us, man?" Marco asked. "Thought we lost for a minute there."

"Yeah. I was just...thinking." I rubbed my face with one hand, then ran it through my hair. I needed a haircut. "There's not really much else we can do tonight, I don't think. Maybe we should pack it in."

It wasn't really a suggestion. I stood up and started clearing my place at the table, taking the dishes back into the house, and everyone else did the same. Cassie offered to do the dishes and I stayed inside to help dry. I only offered because I thought Rachel would stay inside with us, but after a moment she returned to the back porch.

We got away with staying quiet through most of the chore, until Cassie finally said, "I guess we'll be spending a lot more time together now."

"Yeah." I didn't elaborate, just put away the plate I'd been drying.

"You know, if we're going to do this, you can't tiptoe around me like you've been doing."

"I know."

She stopped in the process of handing me another plate and put it back in the sink. "Do you really? Because you've barely said five words to me all day. We're not teenagers anymore; we can't be sending notes through Rachel and Marco or whatever."

I very carefully didn't cringe. She'd noticed the way I answered all of her comments over dinner by talking to Marco. It hadn't happened on purpose. I just couldn't help myself.

"Jake-" She reached out to take my hand and I jerked back from her. "Really? You can't even touch me? You're still that mad?"

"Jesus, Cassie, it's not that. It's-" I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone else was headed into the kitchen, but we were alone. "I mean, last time..."

She blushed and looked down. "Yes, well, just because _that_ happened last time doesn't mean it's going to happen again."

"Because that...wouldn't be good."

"Right."

She turned back to the sink and for one moment I had the impossibly strong desire to grab her up and ask if it really _would_ be such a disaster, if maybe things couldn't be different for us now than they had been in the past. But when I opened my mouth to say something, she just handed me a plate.

Cassie and I had had our chance. We'd mucked it up. We carried so much baggage around each other that dealing with it seemed nearly impossible. Having sex again would just add to our problems, not take them away.

With a sigh, I dried the plate and put it away.

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((A/N: I dislike ff net's system for answering questions asked in the reviews. I don't have a way of answering them in a publicly viewable format. Please direct questions to this site: www-dot-formspring-dot- me/Libby0 where I can answer them for everyone to see. Unless you don't want it answered publicly for some reason.))


	5. Chapter 5

The next day was Saturday. I needed the break the weekend would provide. Granted, I wouldn't get that much of a break. Not with the plans we had. But at least I wouldn't have to face going into work and trying to look my platoon in the face and wonder which of them weren't really...them. I wouldn't have to plaster on a smile or find myself sifting through every conversation and comment for hidden meaning. I wouldn't have to deal with the question of whether or not I could trust them, whether or not they would lure me into an empty office to shove an alien in my head.

How did they even get in a person's head? There were significant holes in my knowledge about the Yeerks.

I couldn't completely relax, though. I'd been talked into keeping an eye on the people in my command and letting Marco help me. We decided to start by getting a rental car. Both Polk and Hash knew my blue Ford F-250, and even if they hadn't, it was a giant, distinctive truck. The fact that I had registration stickers on the front window to get onto base and the army and unit vanity stickers on the back window made it all the more recognizable. Marco's motorcycle was just as memorable, but for opposite reasons. It was tiny and sporty and even though I knew next to nothing about bikes, I could pick it out of a lineup thanks to all the customization he'd done to it. Both vehicles were even worse than Tobias's green Pinto for tailing someone.

Thus, I found myself at a rental agency early in the morning, picking up a tan sedan. I'd driven to my hometown first to avoid accidently running into anyone from base. I took the rental to Marco's house, ready to pick him up for a day of tailing and sneakery.

The front door was locked and he didn't answer when I pounded on the door. I knew he had a hide-a-key somewhere, but I'd forgotten where. I looked under the front mat and found nothing, but before I could get back on my feet Marco opened the door. He wore nothing but boxers and looked like he'd just woken up, blinking and bleary-eyed as he looked down at me.

"What're you doing here?"

Hastily, I got to my feet. "Did you forget? We're supposed to go to the base today."

"Yeah. I mean...you're early."

I looked down at my watch. It was half an hour before we'd agreed to meet, but I hadn't realized that would be a problem. "So, what? You want me to hang out on the stoop for thirty minutes?"

Marco just made a disgruntled face and turned to head back inside, leaving the door open so I could follow him. I closed the door behind me and started to say something, but stopped short when I glanced over at the couch. From behind, all I could see was long black hair spilling over the arm and a small, pale hand; there was a woman asleep there. I looked over at Marco, but he was already in the kitchen.

"Who the hell is that?" I asked in a whisper after I followed him in. A half-empty bottle of tequila and several empty beer bottles littered the counter.

Marco shrugged. "Wendy? Cindy? Something with a 'y'. Don't really care."

"Are you hungover?" I asked, watching him lean on the counter for support while he pulled down a pair of coffee mugs. "Or drunk?"

"Fuck you, Jake. After-" He looked toward the kitchen door, but Wendy/Cindy wasn't in sight. "After the past two days, don't think you can guilt me over a night of drinking. Can't believe we aren't all permanently shit-faced."

"But-"

"Stuff it. I ain't drunk and I ain't hungover. I'm just...up. And it's early."

I watched him try and figure out his coffee maker and had to admit that Marco on an average morning actually didn't act much different than he did while faced _or_ stoned. It was hard to tell just yet if he was actually impaired or if a bit of coffee and a shower would put him to rights.

Marco started the coffee going and then rummaged through his fridge. He came up with a plate of leftover pizza and started eating it cold. "Hungry?" he asked, offering me the plate.

I shook my head. I had no idea how old that pizza was.

"Whatever." Marco shambled off toward the bathroom, still carrying his pizza. He was gone before I thought to ask what I should do if the woman on the couch woke up.

Since I was left alone in the kitchen, I started to wash the dishes. Marco had them stacked in the sink. Even though I knew he would wash them eventually if I left them alone, _he_ knew that I would cave before he did and clean them myself. I hated messes, even though when we were kids I used to be just as much of a slob.

"Didn't think you were they type to cle- Oh!"

I turned around just in time to get a glimpse of naked back and flying hair. The woman from the couch. She'd probably assumed I was Marco when she heard me in the kitchen. A few minutes later, she returned wearing a wrinkled dress and a smile so fake it looked like it hurt.

"Um, sorry about that. I thought you were... Where's Marco?"

"Bathroom," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the dishes in front of me. Her dress was bunched up on one side and didn't _quite_ cover everything and I was pretty sure she didn't realize that.

"Oh. Ah, I see. And he... Who are you?"

"He's just a friend." Marco came into the room, fully dressed and looking much more alert, and kissed the woman on the cheek as he walked past her. "Why do you clean every time you're here?" he asked when he saw me at the sink.

"Because your apartment is filthy."

"That's your opinion." Marco hustled the girl out of the room, talking in a low voice so I couldn't hear.

A few minutes later I heard the sound of the woman getting her things together and then storming out of the apartment. She slammed the door behind her so hard the windows rattled.

"What did you tell her?" I asked when Marco came back in the room.

"'Thanks.' That's polite, right?"

"Only if you don't follow it up with, 'Please leave now.'"

"Oops." Marco didn't sound very apologetic as he put the empty pizza-plate on the stack of dishes I was washing. "So you got us a nice, boring car for the weekend?"

I considered pressing the case of the Wendy/Cindy woman. He'd been a womanizer before, but never quite the 'wham, bam, thank you ma'am' type. He'd never forgotten a girl's name, not that I could remember. Marco was more the type to think that every woman he met was 'true love,' at least for a few weeks until he got bored.

But we had larger things to worry about that day than Marco getting drunk and bringing home a club-hopper.

"Yeah, got us the car. We'll leave whenever you're ready."

Marco poured coffee into a travel mug and headed out without a word to me. Neither one of us spoke, about the woman or about anything else, as he locked up the apartment and I led him down to the rental car. He just slouched in his seat, grumbling occasionally, and I didn't see any reason to disrupt his bad mood.

We'd decided to trail Captain Hash. Actually, _I_ had decided to start with Captain Hash. I told the others it was because it made sense for the more important alien to take the body of the higher ranking officer, but really, none of us had any idea if that were true or not. Still, I just couldn't quite bring myself to tail Polk yet, and I was utterly convinced from Cleever's behavior the night of the incident that he couldn't be more than a peon. A poor one at that.

Hash lived off-post, in a quiet little neighborhood very much like the one I'd grown up in. I'd been to his house a few times before, for company MWR functions and once for a Super Bowl party, so finding it wasn't a problem. We parked on the cross-street a few houses down, where we could see his red minivan in the driveway but where he couldn't see us through a window.

And then we settled in to wait. I'd known, somewhere in the conscious part of my brain, that tailing someone like this would involve a great deal of boredom, but I still wasn't fully prepared for it. Marco almost immediately pulled out his iPhone and started playing games on it, but I didn't have anything to keep me distracted. My phone barely had a working camera on it. It didn't take long for my nervousness about trailing my commander to degenerate into pure boredom.

Around mid-morning, Marco woke me up from a nap and pointed toward Hash's house. The captain was heading out to his van with his youngest daughter, Alexis, towing him along by one arm. Six years old, blond pig-tails, pink shoes. She looked like the quintessential small child. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was intrude on a man about to go on an outing with his kid, but I didn't have a choice. I started my car at the same time he did and followed him through the neighborhood, staying about a block behind him at all times.

Following was easier when we got to the highway and I could put two or three cars between us. Hash got off near the edge of town and pulled into a Chuck E. Cheese's parking lot.

"Well, this is really helpful," I muttered. "We discovered that the man spoils his little girl. Aren't we just the saviors of the earth, following him all the way out here?"

Marco wisely didn't say anything. Even I knew I was just looking for a reason to complain about this, and if he said a single word it would be all I needed to pick a fight with him.

"We'll probably get the police called on us, sitting in the parking lot of a little kid place."

"We'll have to go in," Marco pointed out.

I glared over at him, almost crashing into a car backing out of a parking space in the process.

"Don't give me that look, Jake. You know we can't just leave him alone in there."

"It's a Chuck E Cheese. What do you think he's going to do in there? Have a battle meeting in the ball pit?"

"We're not going to learn anything if we just sit outside in a bunch of different parking lots. It's bad enough we can't figure out how to bug the inside of his house."

"_Fine_. But what are _we_ going to do? It's a kids place. We're going to look like pedophiles."

"So we'll sit at a table and pretend we're waiting for some little kid to get done playing. Why are you making such a case about this?"

I didn't answer. I was making a case because I really didn't want to go in there and intrude on a simple father-daughter outing. And I hated Marco for shooting down all of my arguments. In a reverse situation, I probably would have said all the same things he was saying, but that hardly made it any better.

We parked and went inside. Marco chatted at me while we waited in line about how his ex was always late dropping his kid off and we'd probably have to wait a while before they showed up, making sure that the young woman at the counter overheard so we could have a ready excuse for entering. She made some commiserating remark as she took our money and Marco smiled and winked at her.

We picked a corner table where we could see the entire dining area and tried to look as unobtrusive as possible. Hash and Alexis were seated in a booth along one wall, which surprised me. They both had drinks, but no food, and Alexis wasn't bouncing around or running off to play on the game side.

It was still mid-morning, late enough to eat lunch if wanted but still too early for there to be a crowd. I sat with my back to Hash, just in case he looked over a recognized me.

"Well, this has got to be the most exciting play date ever," Marco said.

"Shut up. Maybe she doesn't want to go play."

"Or maybe they're meeting someone." Marco jerked his chin toward their table and I turned to look. Two more people had arrived, a middle-aged man and a woman, and they slid into the booth on the opposite side of the table. "Curious."

I shrugged. "So, maybe they're related or something."

"Dude, you are so deep in denial."

"Am not. Come on, he's not going to meet with...you know, others with his daughter right there."

"You think? Let's find out." He got up and I started to follow, but he motioned for me to stay down.

I watched as he made his way back to the kitchen door and started flirting with a waitress. Since I had no idea how that was supposed to help anything, I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to watching Hash and the others. They were all engaged in intense conversation, even Alexis. Somewhat desperately, I tried to spot any familial similarities between Hash and either of the newcomers.

My phone rang and the caller ID told me it was Marco. I glanced around but couldn't see him anywhere on the dining floor, so I answered. "Where'd you go?"

"In the kitchen. Keep the line open but don't make any noise, okay?"

"Why?"

"You'll see in a minute. Just stay quiet and don't hang up."

Curious, I did what he said and waited. Soon, Marco came out of the kitchen wearing an employee t-shirt and an apron and carrying a tray of something. He delivered the tray to Hash's table and I realized that I could hear them through my phone.

"But we didn't order this." The woman. She was trying to keep Marco from placing the tray on the table.

"I know. Complementary from the kitchen, for the 1,000th customer. There was supposed to be a fanfare to go with it, but we're running a little short today."

"Really, we don't want it."

"Please, ma'am. If I bring it back they'll get all on my case and-"

"Okay, fine." Hash cleared a space in the center of the table. "Just leave it here and go."

Marco put his tray down and headed for the kitchen. Through the phone, I could still hear the four at the table complaining about being interrupted.

"It doesn't matter. Just eat it and stop complaining." For a moment I couldn't place the voice, then I realized it was coming from Alexis. She reached across her father and pulled off a piece of what I finally recognized as cinnamon sticks. "We've only got an hour. Tell us about the place you found."

"It's on the edge of town, maybe half a mile from here." The man leaned in closer as spoke, but that just made it clearer over my phone. Marco must have hidden his phone somewhere under the tray. "Part of a shopping strip next to a grocery store. Not quite as big as command wanted, but the ground composition is perfect for the tunnel."

"Do you have the geological report?"

The man put something on the table. From my seat, I couldn't tell what it was. "The realtor gave it to us. Probably the best their human technology can manage. Once we get in there, we can do a better survey."

Alexis picked up the object and looked it over. Alexis, not Hash. My gut dropped as I realized she was the one running this little band of Yeerks. They hadn't only taken my commander, they'd taken his six-year-old little girl as well. I balled hands into fists on the table, but there was no one to fight. I couldn't exactly strike down the aliens around the table, I'd only accomplish hitting their hosts.

"It's tiny," Alexis complained. "The sub-visser isn't going to like it."

"Well, if he doesn't like he should give us a better budget." The woman poked at the cinnamon sticks on the table but didn't eat any. "This is California real estate we're talking about. A quarter acre here costs as much as an entire Fenish moon, kip curse it. These humans are insane."

"Keep it down," Hash warned. "There's too many of them around to be talking like that."

The woman shrugged. "No one can hear us. Isn't that why we picked this place to meet? Everyone's distracted chasing after their little brats."

"Hey." Alexis looked offended and shoved the object back across the table toward the man. "Not all the kids are brats." When everyone just looked at her for a moment, she glared at them. "What? Oh, shut up, you don't have to live like one."

I looked up as Marco joined me at the table, looking mightily pleased with himself. I put my own phone on speaker so he could listen in as well.

"Look, you're just going to have to find a way to make it work with what you've got," Alexis told the other pair. "I'll try and talk to the sub-visser about increasing the budget, but everyone's tight right now. We can only create so much capital without drawing attention. Just make sure it's big enough for the tunnels we need."

Marco raised his eyebrow in surprise at me, but I ignored him and focused on the phone.

"We'll, we've got a few other options." The man pulled out a stack of other objects. With them all spread out on the table, I realized they looked like half-sized compact disks in clear plastic cases. "But they're not going to be as easy to get to."

Suddenly my phone started buzzing and the display told me that Cassie was trying to call. I jumped to turn the phone off before the people at the other table heard, but a quick glance over at them assured me that they hadn't noticed a thing. They were all engrossed in looking at the little disks.

I'd accidently hung up on Cassie in all my fumbling with the phone, so I called her back.

"Jake? I think you two need to come back here."

"We're a little busy right now."

"No, I mean, you _really_ need to come back here. We found another one."

"Another one what?"

"Another Andalite."

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((A/N: I dislike ff net's system for answering questions asked in the reviews. I don't have a way of answering them in a publicly viewable format. Please direct questions to this site: www-dot-formspring-dot- me/Libby0 where I can answer them for everyone to see. Unless you don't want it answered publicly for some reason.))


	6. Chapter 6

Getting Marco's phone back before we left was a trick. He returned to the table as a waiter and tried to take the tray. I couldn't hear what was said and I didn't see him palm the phone, but after a short argument with the aliens he left the tray there and returned to me, holding his phone up and shooing me out the door ahead of him.

We sped the entire way back to town, but it still took us the better part of an hour to get there. The rest of the group met us outside Cassie's house, in back of the three stark-white buildings that comprise the Rescue Center.

Cassie perched on the railing of a small, empty pen while Tobias paced. When Cassie saw us, she turned to look over her shoulder and whistled. Rachel came running over from the nearby tree line.

"Took you guys long enough to get here," Rachel said when she got close enough.

I shrugged off the comment. Not worth arguing over. "What's this about another Andalite?"

"It's crashed in the state park, about a mile and a quarter that way," Cassie told us pointing west. "Or the ship is, at least. We're not sure about the actual Andalite."

"Yes, and the group of bloodthirsty maniacs with guns are half a mile in _that_ direction." Tobias pointed toward the road. "Getting ready to take him out."

"How did you guys find out about a space ship crashed in the middle of nowhere?" Marco asked.

"We overheard Chapman setting up this little search-and-destroy operation over the phone." Rachel propped her hands on her hips and raised one eyebrow as she turned on Cassie and Tobias. "So can we go _do_ something about it now?"

"Do something?" Marco asked. "About the 'bloodthirsty maniacs with guns'? Never figured you for the suicidal type."

"Why didn't you just call the cops?" I asked before Rachel could answer. "Tell them there's some hillbillies with weapons out and about?"

"Because the cops are already there," Rachel answered. "They set up a road block and are directing the whole thing."

My blood ran cold when she said that. Next to me, Marco started cursing. These aliens were in our military, our high schools, and even in the police force? Even if we did find proof of this invasion, was there anyone left we could actually tell it to?

"How'd you find out what they're up to, if they've got the roads blocked?" I asked.

"We walked." Tobias shrugged. "They've only got the roads watched. We went in through that way and got pretty close without them noticing."

I looked back at the trees Rachel had come from, the beginnings of a plan forming in my mind. A crazy plan. The kind of plan I might present to my platoon on an exercise, but not to a group of civilians when there were real bullets involved.

Still, Rachel was right. We couldn't sit back and let them take our best shot at getting our hands on alien proof.

"How many of them are there?"

"A dozen. Give or take."

"When's the last time you guys checked on them?"

"A few minutes ago. They were still getting organized." Rachel dropped her hands, losing her challenging stance. "Why?"

"Jake, man, tell me you're not thinking of going after them." Marco grabbed my arm but I didn't turn to look at them. "Jake, it's crazy. There's five of us. They have _guns_."

Rachel could shoot. I knew because she'd made me teach her how the first time I got back from basic. Cassie and Marco could, too; both of them were as good as any sharpshooters in my unit. I wasn't sure about Tobias, but we wouldn't need everyone. If we could set it up right, three shooters would be enough.

"Cassie?" I finally turned away from the trees to look at her. "How many of those tranq rifles do you guys have? The ones you use for the big game?"

Confusion flashed through her eyes, but only for a moment before she figured out what I was getting at. She jumped off the fence and headed toward the nearest Center building. "We've got five. No, four, one's broken."

The rest of us followed her toward the door, all except Marco.

"No way. There's no way you can seriously be considering going after these guys with tranquilizer darts!"

"Well what do you want us to do?" Rachel demanded. "Hit them over the head with tree branches?"

"I want us to stay put right here and tell someone else to take care of it."

"Tell who, Marco? The police officers who are already over there?"

"Well then let the damn alien rescue himself!"

I took Rachel by the arm before she could shout back and propelled her toward the door. "Marco, you don't have to do this if you don't want. Just stay back. We can take care of it with four people."

"Don't think I won't!" he yelled, staying firmly outside while the rest of us went in. He didn't look the least bit happy to have the door slammed shut in his face.

"Coward," Rachel muttered as we joined Cassie and Tobias.

I shook my head and said nothing. I understood where Marco was coming from. I understood better than I wanted to. It didn't take courage to run into a fight so much as it took a special kind of idiocy. On a certain level, I knew I could never blame Marco for not wanting to be part of violence. On every other level, I was angry at him for making me go into this without him. I _needed_ someone I could trust at my back, someone I could rely on without thinking, and Marco was the only person available who fit that bill. I liked Rachel and Cassie, and Tobias seemed an okay sort, but I _knew_ Marco. Or, I thought I had.

The door had led to an office. It was a large room with two desks and a barely contained mess of stacked files and overflowing boxes. Behind her father's desk, a locked gun case was propped against the wall. Cassie pulled out a ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked the front of the case, reveling four short rifles.

I'd seen her father shoot an injured wolf with one, back in high school when I'd helped out around the Center on my weekends. It had been caught in a trap and escaped, too injured to be okay on its own but just well enough to go berserk on anyone who tried to catch it. Cassie and I had both practiced with these guns when were teens, and I knew she was dead accurate with them. I also knew she hated the things and used them only out of necessity. Her face was impassive as she took them out and methodically checked each one before placing it on the table.

"I don't know how to shoot," Tobias said, staring at the stack of weapons.

"That's okay," I told him. "How are you at running?"

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Fifteen minutes later, I'd changed into a woodland cammo jacket and was sitting in a tree, waiting, shifting the light weight rifle in my hands and trying to find a comfortable spot. Rachel and Cassie were sitting in their own trees and Tobias was on the ground, ready to create a diversion. We'd given him a blue jacket instead of a cammo one, the closest we could find to the shade of Elfangor's coat.

I already felt bad about using Tobias for bait, but I shoved the feeling down as much as I could. Tobias had seemed eager enough for the role, fearless even, and I ignored the voice in my head that told me it was only because he was clueless. No one who knew what it was like to actually be shot at was ever _that_ eager to face it again.

We'd picked a spot just off the trail we expected the Yeerks to take, on the side of a hill where the growth was sparse at the bottom and thicker at the top. It was decent as an ambush site, the best we were likely to find given such short notice.

I never heard the Yeerks approaching, but I did hear the deafening _CRACK_ of a heavy branch being pulled out of a tree. Faintly, I heard voices shouting after that, though I couldn't make out what they were saying.

A few minutes later, another branch broke. The shouting voices came closer and then abruptly stopped. For a moment I worried that they hadn't taken the bait, then I saw a flash of pale skin through the sights on my rifle. They were coming; someone had simply reminded them to stop yelling.

The Yeerks stayed at the bottom of the hill, skirting the open section. I saw only flashes of them through the trees. They would have to come much closer before we could shot them. The tranq rifles were little better than air guns and only effective for a couple hundred feet.

Tobias ran up out of the woods and stopped below my tree, bent over, hands braced on his knees, trying to catch his breath. After a moment he looked up at me, gave me a cheeky thumbs-up, and took off running again. If nothing else could be said about the man, he was at least light on his feet.

I prayed that would be enough to keep him out of trouble and turned my attention back to the Yeerks.

Tobias began to crash through the undergrowth near my tree, managing to make a lot of noise as he broke small branches and forced his way through thick bushes. To a city-bred ear, it wouldn't have been much, but in the tense silence of waiting in the woods it seemed nearly deafening. He flirted close enough to the edge of the trees that the Yeerks would be able to see his blue jacked if they looked right, but wouldn't be able to get a clear view of him.

It worked. Soon enough I heard shouting again, men yelling 'it's over there!' and 'this way!' as they started to run toward me. I let the tunnel vision overtake me, forgetting everything else as I focused through my sights on one man. The only thing in the world that truly existed was the plastic buttstock against my cheek and the middle-aged police officer running steadily toward me.

I let him get all the way to me before I squeezed the trigger. The dart hit him in the leg, dead on target, and he shouted in surprise. For a moment nothing happened, then his eyes rolled up in his head and he tumbled to the ground.

Before he hit, I'd already uncapped a new dart and reloaded the rifle. The officer I'd shot was at the back of the pack, one of the slowest men chasing Tobias, and the closest Yeerk to him had to turn around to see what his shout was for. Before he had a chance to run back to his friend, I shot him, too.

Two down, nine to go. But the others were on alert now.

Down the hill, a firecracker exploded. I ignored the noise and reloaded my rifle again, though in the back of my mind I was surprised that Tobias had gotten down there so fast. He showed a flash of blue through the trees again.

"There's another one!" The bull of a man in a hunting jacket seemed to be the leader of the group and pointed back toward Tobias's new position. I aimed for him next. "You three, go that way and cut him off." The three men closest took off running, skirting around the open ground.

Bull was at the edge of my range. Maybe I could hit him, maybe I couldn't. Not worth the chance. I shifted to a closer target.

Behind me, another branch crashed noisily to the ground. Rachel, adding to the confusion. I shot the man closest to my tree.

"What the fuc-" He crumpled before he could finish his curse.

"It's an ambush!" Bull cried. "Get to the high ground!"

Good idea, I thought. Too bad it took three of your guys going down before you got it.

They scrambled to get up the hill, but before they could get more than a hundred yards, another one collapsed. Cassie, stationed further uphill from me, taking out the lead runner.

Four remained: Bull, two police officers, and a balding man in business slacks and hiking boots. The officers both had their service revolvers out. Bull carried a hunting rifle, a powerful one that made my dart rifle look like a child's toy. The last man carried what I could only assume to be an alien firearm. Sleek, made of some dark, dark red metal, it had a very short barrel and a grip that curved back around the man's hand.

Unfortunately, they were all aiming at ground level. Expecting an enemy that couldn't climb trees, they never once looked up.

Bull led his remaining men at a run up the hill and back toward the trail. I shot at one more as they ran off and missed. Cassie, who was closer, did not. One of the officers tripped mid-run and did not get up again.

I dropped out of the tree as soon as they were gone and ran after them. In the distance, I heard another firecracker go off and knew Tobias was still leading his men on a merry chase.

The men ahead of me were slow and stopped to look in the direction of the firecracker. I gave them a wide berth and went around them, intent on getting in front of them. Apparently I wasn't as quiet as I could have been; one of them started shooting into the woods around me, the concussive blast of gunfire exploding again and again. I dropped to the ground behind a log, but all the shots were aimed behind me. They hadn't seen me and were firing blind into the woods.

Abruptly the gunfire stopped, then started up again aimed in the opposite direction. Baldie had collapsed, and the remaining two were gunning down everything that moved. Fortunately, they weren't aiming high enough to hit Rachel.

I braced my rifle against the log and shot the last cop high on the leg. He grabbed at it and cried out in surprise before he slumped to the ground. Bull did not stop to look after his friend but took off running.

Rather than chase him, I went to Rachel's tree and motioned for her to come down. She tossed her rifle to me and then dropped lightly to the ground, as graceful as she'd ever been during her gymnast days.

"Why didn't you get the last one?" she demanded.

"Forget it, he's running for the road. Come on, Tobias has three guys on him."

That was enough to convince her and we both ran back toward Cassie. She was waiting for us at the bottom of her tree. "That way," she said as soon as we approached, pointing downhill and to the east. "I saw them a few seconds ago."

We ran through the trees, trying to remain as quiet as we could while carrying our rifles and remaining unseen. Tobias had been told to stay close so that we could catch up and help him if he ended up pursued, but that still left a lot of ground to cover looking for him.

After a few minutes, we heard a high-pitched whistle and changed course, running down hill. We stopped short at the edge of the clearing, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Tobias crouched on the ground, checking the vitals on a man sprawled out on the dirt. Marco stood off to the side, twirling around a tree branch.

"Where did you come from?" I asked. Glancing down at the man, I asked, "And what did you do?"

"I hit him on the head with a tree branch. What's it look like?"

Beside me, Rachel laughed, though she was trying to catch her breath at the same time.

"But what are you doing here?"

"What? You guys were taking forever to get back and..." Marco scowled and shrugged rather than finish his sentence. "Anyway, so what, I just walked over to the tree line to see if I could hear anything and this guy came running past so...I hit him."

Tobias snorted. "He ran after us and _then_ hit him. The farm's way back over that way."

"Okay, fine, I ran him down and then hit him. What difference does it make?"

It made a great deal of difference to me, to know that my best friend wouldn't completely abandon us. I could hardly blame him for not wanting to march purposefully into danger, when he'd _seen_ he was needed, he still came through, in spite of everything. It meant, to me at least, that Marco's reluctance didn't stem purely from fear. "What happened to the other two?" I asked Tobias.

He shrugged, now sitting on the ground. He was covered in sweat and his glasses kept slipping down his nose. "Lost? This guy was the only one that could keep up with me. Did you get the rest?"

"Most of them." I held out a hand to Tobias and helped him to his feet. "Come on. We should go check out that spaceship before they regroup and come back."

We all headed back into the woods, taking a detour along the way to collect the tranquilizer darts when Marco pointed out that they could be traced back to Cassie if we left them. We pulled all the unconscious men behind some thick bushes and hogtied them with their shoelaces, in case they woke up sooner than expected. Cassie thought they'd stay out for half an hour or so, but we'd shot them with doses intended for animals. She didn't know for sure how well it would work on humans. We hid their weapons in a separate place, and at the last minute I decided to tuck the alien firearm into my waistband. With that done, we let Cassie lead the way to the crash site.

She'd been able to guess on a map where it was, judging from the Yeerk's overheard conversations, but we figured it would still take some searching to find it. It didn't. Before we'd gone half a mile we smelled smoke and charred wood, which directed us just slightly off the trail until we found a long trail of broken and burned trees. The path of destruction moved lower and lower through foliage until it turned into a deep gouge carved into the dirt.

We stared at it for a long time, torn between not quiet believing it was real and not quite believing it had been so easy to find.

"So...what do you think we'll find at the end?" Marco asked, squinting at the far end.

"Hopefully not a dead Andalite." I eyed the charred bits of tree and wondered if this could possibly be anything other than a crash landing. Although it seemed a little improbable that any well-flown spacecraft could cause this much damage, I reminded myself that I didn't know anything about spacecraft. Maybe they simply weren't designed to land in the woods.

"We won't find out unless we go," Rachel pointed out.

I nodded absently, until the sharp, warm edge of a blade pressed against my throat. Then I didn't move at all.

{Don't move, Yeerk,} an Andalite 'voice' demanded. {Or I'll take your head off.}


	7. Chapter 7

The Andalite was behind me and I didn't dare turn my head to look. I could see the others, though, eyes wide as they stared at the alien that had me literally by the throat.

Rachel raised her rifle and pointed it at the Andalite. "Let him go."

"Rachel, stop." Very slowly, I held my own gun out and dropped it. "Lay it down. Cassie, you, too."

Cassie put hers down immediately, but Rachel hesitated. I gave her a stern look, as if I didn't have a knife on my neck, until she relented and placed hers on the ground as well.

I held my hands out to the side slightly, palms open to show I didn't hold anything. "We're unarmed and we're not Yeerks. We just want to talk to you."

{Why should I believe that?} The Andalite took the alien gun out of my waistband - I'd forgotten I carried it - and pointed it over my shoulder at Rachel. {Nobody moves.}

His hand was in my sight. I tried to judge if I could grab him by the tail and the arm at the same time, but I didn't know enough about this species. He might be able to decapitate me before I could move. He might be too strong for me. Our best chance of getting out of this in one piece was to convince him to calm down.

"No one's going to move," I assured him. "No one's going to do anything unless you say so. Isn't that right, guys?"

The others all nodded, and the alien twitched his gun between one bobbing head and the next.

"Just...just stay calm and maybe back up a step and we can talk like reasonable people. We didn't come here to hurt you."

{Shut up, Yeerk.}

We stayed that way for a full minute, no one daring to move. The alien clearly didn't know what to do with us and his shaking hand on the gun didn't give me much confidence that he wouldn't lose it at any second and cut me. I tried to ignore my pounding heart and dry mouth and figure out what the hell we could say that would get us out of this, but without knowing anything about Andalites and their war, it was impossible.

"Elfangor sent us," I said finally, figuring it had as much chance as anything else of working.

The tail blade bit into my neck and I hissed at the pain, but I didn't move. An inch or two in the wrong direction and I'd be dead.

"He did. We found him two nights ago and-"

{Where is he?}

The blade pressed harder against my neck and I had to lean back slightly. "He's dead. The...the-um...Visser. The Visser killed him. But he told us...ah, told us to find..." Shit, it was hard to think about anything except the trickle of blood running down my chest and the fact that I was millimeters away from death.

{What did he tell you?}

I realized my mistake. Elfangor hadn't 'sent' us, and the alien behind me was trying to catch me in a lie. "He told us to warn people," I amended in a hurry. "He told us about the Yeerks and the...the space battle and then said, 'Tell everyone.'"

Another long moment of silence. I hardly dared to breathe for fear I'd slice my windpipe open.

"Look, we're not Yeerks." Marco held his hands up as he talked. "But there's a bunch of people back there who are, and they might come over here any minute, so maybe we could continue this debate somewhere not out in the open?"

The Andalite hesitated for a moment, then finally he released me. I stumbled out of reach of that tail as soon as I could, turning to face him as I did so. The alien looked just like Elfangor, although I attributed that to the fact I didn't know anything about the species. It was hard to look past the four eyes and slit nose and see any individual nuances.

{Come with me.}

Cassie ignored him and inspected the cut on my neck, even as the other three started to follow the Andalite.

"It's okay," I insisted, picking up her rifle for her and ushering her toward the others.

"It is not. You're going to need stitches." She walked backward, still fussing to get a good look, and pulled out a handkerchief from her pocket. "At least put something over it."

"I'm fine. We're getting left behind." I balled up the handkerchief and pressed it against my neck to stem the blood. He'd only managed to cut the skin, and since I no longer had the blade against me, I wasn't too worried.

The Andalite didn't lead us to his ship, as I'd half-expected, but into the woods uphill from the path of destruction. He'd picked out a spot from which he could spy anyone approaching the crash site and had dug a shallow hollow underneath a tree. A tarp that perfectly mimicked the forest floor stretched halfway over the hollow like a tent, offering some protection from the elements.

"What's your name?" I asked as we approached the impromptu shelter.

He looked back at me with one stalk eye, never breaking stride. {I am Warrior Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill.}

Like before, I received a world of information along with the name. He didn't identify himself just with a string of sounds. I felt his pride in his rank, I saw his family. In a breath I knew that he loved his job, that he all but defined himself by it, and that Elfangor had been both his brother and his commander. In front of me, Marco stopped walking and muttered, "Shit."

"What are you doing here?" Tobias asked. We reached the hollow but stood in a rough circle beside it. "We...ah, we were under the impression that no one...um, survived."

{No one else did.} Aximili kept such a tight control on his pain that his words felt eerily hollow. {I was sent out with the burn ship, but I came here to look for my Prince.}

I couldn't tell what a burn ship was, only that Aximili thought the assignment was beneath him. Rather than impression of the thing, all I got was contempt for it.

"We're sorry for your loss," Cassie offered hesitantly. "He died fighting, if that's anything."

Aximili blinked at her. {Prince Elfangor would not die any other way,} he insisted hotly. {He was not a coward!}

"No one said that." I stepped between Cassie and Aximili automatically; every show of anger made me worried he'd lash out with that tail. "Not even close. We only knew him for a few minutes, but even so I could tell he was an honorable fighter."

{He was the best.} Aximili looked toward the sky with all four eyes for a moment, then turned toward his shelter. {He should have died with his ship.} He reached under the tarp and pulled out a green bag.

"He was trying to help us," Cassie said, stepping up beside me. "To warn us, so that we could have a fighting chance against the Yeerks."

I glanced over at her, wondering what exactly she was getting at.

Marco did not suffer under the same confusion. "Thing is, we're having a little trouble doing that on our own."

Aximili declined to answer and instead motioned for me to come closer. I went, and he pulled a small, square green patch out of the bag. He took my bloody handkerchief and slapped the patch on my neck over the cut instead.

It burned my skin. "Hol-Wha-_Ow_!" I clawed at my neck, trying to get it off, but it felt like it had fused into place. There were no edges to grip, nothing for my fingernails to catch on.

{The burning sensation will cease momentarily,} he told me, clearly unimpressed with my antics. Even as he said it, the pain started to fade and I stopped trying to scratch it off. So long as it didn't cause damage, it would certainly bypass the need for stitches. Aximili looked over at Marco with his two main eyes. {You are trying to ask for my help in fighting the Yeerks?}

Marco shrugged. "Something like that."

Once again, Aximili looked skyward. {Our detachment was destroyed. With Prince Elfangor dead, I must return to the Fleet. We will send more ships as soon as we can.}

I didn't need the telepathic undertones to understand that 'as soon as we can' wasn't likely to be soon enough.

"Great, then you'll come back to do battle _against_ the humans instead of rescue them," Marco snapped. "Look, we're not asking you for much. We don't want to fight these bastards. Just stick around long enough to tell a few key people what's going on and then fly off in good conscience. All we need is some proof for our people that this whole invasion thing is happening."

Aximili made a diagonal slicing motion with his hands before Marco even finished speaking. {It is not allowed.}

"_Not allowed_?" I thought Marco's head would pop off right then. For the first time since I'd known him, he was rendered speechless.

{Your species is not sufficiently advanced enough to receive contact from interterrestrials.}

"Look, I hate to pop your bubble here," Rachel pointed out, "but we've already been contacted by those creepy slug things, so it's sort of a moot point."

{That's not my decision,} Aximili told her. {Revelation of interterrestials to natives who are unprepared for it has a history of inciting panic, internal conflict, and wars.} His words sounded dry, like he was reciting them from a text book. After a moment, he looked up again and added, {And those who tried it without Fleet backing tend to...die.}

That tidbit came with a slight shiver of fear, the impression of a boogieman-esque story. As if he'd heard terrible things about contacting 'natives' all his life.

"You don't seem to mind talking to us," I pointed out.

{You are only five and pose no threat.}

No threat? Really? We had guns, albeit useless ones. But he didn't know that. Rachel and I were almost as tall as Aximili; Marco was stocky enough to look like he could put up a good fight, which he could. We outnumbered him.

I reminded myself that we didn't _want_ to threaten the Andalite and stamped down my annoyance. "You-"

"At least let us help you move away from this place." Cassie cut me off, putting a hand on my arm to keep me from saying anything else. "The Yeerks already know where you and your ship are. We've kept them from finding you for now, but they will come back eventually."

We all looked at Cassie, shocked and confused by this suggestion. Why should we help this guy leave us in a bind? Unless... After a moment of thinking, I wondered if she meant it to be a stall tactic. Give us an excuse to stick around and work with the guy, which would also give us an excuse to keep trying to convince him. An easy way to justify out continued presence and a gesture of goodwill all in one stroke. Subtle, but I'd expect no less from her.

{What do you mean, you kept them from finding me?}

"We had to fight off like eight of them on the way over here," Marco said, embellishing only slightly. "They had a whole hunting party out looking for you. And they'll have another one again soon enough."

Aximili hesitated, one stalk eye glancing toward the end of the burned-out path, toward what I could only assume was his ship.

"The ship doesn't work, does it?" I asked.

{It requires a few repairs. It is nothing I cannot solve given time.}

"Well, time is what you don't have," Marco told him, his tone needlessly cruel. Tobias jabbed him in the gut with one elbow.

"We can help you," I told him, "but not indefinitely. There's only us five, and they'll bring more people when they try again. And even _more_ if that doesn't work. This isn't a place to stand and make a fight of it, not if you're trying to fix your ship at the same time. It's not defensible enough."

{I can't leave my ship.}

"Well you can't stay here."

{I _can't_ leave my ship. It's a burn ship. It carries all the unit's most sensitive material, to be destroyed in case...in case the worst were to happen.}

In case the mothership were taken captive. To keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy. I was well familiar with the concept. Unfortunately, I also knew what had to be done, and I didn't think Aximili would like it. The ship would have to be destroyed. The fact that it was sensitive didn't change the fact that we couldn't defend it.

Aximili kept glancing back toward the ship, and I knew from the slump of his shoulders that I wouldn't have to point out the obvious to him.

Tobias perked up suddenly. "Hear that?"

Everyone started to look around, as if somehow that would help our hearing. Faintly, I made out the sound of approaching chopper blades. More than that, though. I'd worked around all sorts of aircraft; I could distinguish most of them by sound. This was a small bird, only one rotor. Probably a police or traffic helicopter.

"They're searching." I caught Aximili's gaze with my own and held it. "Save what you can. Destroy the rest. We'll hide you for now and figure out the rest later."

{I cannot help-}

"No conditions attached. But we need to move _now_."

Aximili hesitated a moment more, then he turned and pulled two more bags out from the hollow. With those slung over his back, he turned and headed through the woods at a quick pace, the rest of us running to follow.

Marco dropped to the back to run next to me. "Are you nuts? This guy is our best bet at getting some real help out of this mess, and we've got him by the balls. And you offer him a get-out-of-jail-free card? You know as soon as we get out of here, he's going to split and we'll never see him again."

"I'm not going to threaten someone who's supposed to be an ally," I insisted. When Marco scowled at me and opened his mouth to make another argument, I added, "Besides, we'll all die if we stand here arguing about it too long."

That was enough to shut him up and we focused instead on keeping up with Aximili as we raced through the trees to the crash site.

His burn ship was tiny, about the size of a station wagon. It didn't look large enough to get off the ground and had no obvious engines, nor did it look damaged beyond a few dents and scratches on the hull. When Aximili opened a hatch on the side, we could all see that the interior was barely large enough to hold one Andalite.

"This is all your biggest secrets?" Marco asked, peeking in the door.

Aximili opened one of the panels and started to remove what I immediately recognized as hard drives. Smaller and more complex than anything on Earth, the 'motherboard look' was there none-the-less.

"Oh." Marco made a face and stepped back from the door.

Aximili stuff the drives into one bag and tossed it out of the ship. Then he started opening drawers and compartments and pulling out other stuff. Shrink-wrapped packages covered in odd script, piles of thin cartridges, vials of something, even a small sky-blue box. Most of the stuff he left in place and I couldn't tell what his system was for deciding, if he even had one. Once they were full, he tossed out the other two bags as well.

{The self-destruction should be contained. But we should still get well away from it, just in case.}

"No argument there." Marco picked up one of the bags and tossed the other two to Tobias and me. "Get out here and we'll start running."

Aximili worked on something that looked vaguely like a keyboard for a moment, then joined us outside the ship. The hatch sealed itself as we left.

We followed Cassie back toward the farm, trusting her sense of direction to get us out of things. The sound of searching helicopters kept us company, although thankfully they didn't seem to be getting any closer.

Not until the muffled sound of an explosion went off behind us. The noise was slight, but the concussion effect rolled over us like a physical punch, making me stumble slightly. Cassie almost fell and I steadied her as best I could. "Come on. Keep running."

The chopper veered closer after that, bearing down on us. It passed south of us and headed to the crash site, but once they found it, it would only be a matter of time before they spread out and caught up to us. So long as we only had the bird to worry about, we would make it to the farm. Probably.

I didn't even want to think about what would happen if we ran into ground searchers, though.

Cassie led us on a twisting route through the trees, having to backtrack in places where the undergrowth was too thick. We weren't on any real trial, which slowed us down considerably. Still we pressed on, the sound of approaching aircraft spurring us to move faster and faster.

"Spread out that way!" A faint voice, off to our left.

I held up my fist in the 'halt' signal which, thankfully, appeared to be universal.

"They might try to head toward town. Cut 'em off here and sweep inward."

I recognized the voice. The bull-like man who'd lead the last group. And now he was cutting off our only path to escape.

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((AN - View character sheets with info, photos, and random tidbits for all the characters on my LJ here: off-the-tracks. livejournal. com /8845. html ))


	8. Chapter 8

Silently, I motioned for the others to stick together and head back to a patch of denser brush. The voices we'd heard were faint, still far away. It was impossible to tell just _how_ far away, and how long we had before they found us.

Add to that, Aximili was almost impossible to hide. While the rest of us crouched in the middle of some bushes, he stuck out like a sore thumb. Nothing in the forest was large enough to hide a bright-blue alien the size of a horse.

"What do we do now?" Marco hissed, his voice barely audible.

"We'll have to punch through their line." I scratched at the patch on my neck as I thought. We still had the three tranq rifles and a few more doses. Aximili had the Yeerk weapon I'd taken from the downed man before. I didn't know if his bag of tricks had anything useful, so I didn't count them.

"Dude, you know if any of them see us hanging out with this guy, even if we get away we'll still be dead."

I did know. "So we'll have to not be seen." I looked from one face to the next, trying to judge who would be best at what. I felt a sharp pang of guilt as I wished for my own platoon, my own men who I knew inside and out. But I couldn't trust those men, and I'd have to instead rely on my friends, civilians who should never be put in this situation, and to top it all off I wasn't entirely sure what they were capable of.

Finally I rested on Tobias. He looked recovered from his run earlier, and I knew he could be quiet. "Try and see what they're up to," I told him. As he nodded and started to stand up, I grabbed him by the sleeve. "If you can. If you can't do it without being seen, then just get back here."

"Right." Tobias ran off easily, almost silent.

"Jake, you-" Marco cut himself off and glared at the ground, looking like he was debating with himself. I could guess well enough what about. As much as he didn't want to rush head-long into a fight, he was pragmatic enough to realize we didn't have a choice.

"We only need to take out one or two of them, probably. Then we get through the hole in the line with no one else the wiser and book it back to the farm."

"Use blue boy here as bait?" Marco asked.

Aximili visibly bristled at the comment, but I cut in before a fight could start. "No. We don't give them a chance to yell for help. This will only work if we're quiet and if they don't see a thing coming." I looked up at Rachel and held her gaze with my own. "We'll have to get personal for this."

She nodded. I knew she would. Rachel, out of everyone gathered, would be the one most willing to go along with me. And that's what I needed at the moment - someone who wouldn't hesitate. Skill meant nothing if the person paused at the wrong second.

{Surely you don't mean to use these people for an attack? I think I-}

"I'm sure you could take all these guys on single-handed, but that would draw attention." I didn't even think about it before cutting down Aximili. "Right now we need to make sure that you aren't seen so that they don't call for back-up."

{Preposterous. A Warrior does not hide from battle.}

"This time, he does." I turned to Aximili, trying to look as authoritative as possible. I didn't have time to argue with him on the point, and we wouldn't survive if he tried to act on his own. The fact that I was practically insulting him would have to wait until later to get sorted out. I could apologize when we were all safe and sound, but for now I _needed_ him to follow me and not question it.

Aximili puffed out his chest like he was about to argue, but he didn't say anything. For a long moment we stayed like that, both silently trying to assert dominance. He cracked first; he didn't look away, but the shift in his stance was noticeable and he deflated slightly.

Tobias returned at that moment, providing a welcome relief from the tense moment. "There's not that many of them," he said. "Ten, maybe fifteen yards apart each. Everyone's kind of zig-zagging back and forth, so they're going pretty slow. I couldn't see how far out the line went."

Someone on the other side knew their stuff. The searchers were far enough apart that they wouldn't foul each other, but close enough to be in sight of each other. Too close to slip through unseen, which had been my unvoiced hope.

"Alright, here's how it goes. Cassie, Marco, you two stay here with Axmil- Axim- With Ax." I reached in my pocket and pulled out the tranq doses I still had left, kept two for myself, and handed the rest over to Marco along with my rifle. "Stay hidden and don't move if you don't have to. Rachel and Tobias are with me."

I took off Ax's pack and gave that to Marco as well, but not before I retrieved the firearm and stuck that in my waistband again. I would have sold my left foot for a holster right then.

Rachel hugged Cassie briefly, then joined Tobias and me as we crept away from the hiding place. Tobias led the way until I could see the line of searchers for myself.

I tried to use hand-signals to tell the other two where to go, and when that didn't work I resorted to pantomime. They got the message and left at a trot as I prayed they would be okay.

After they left, I picked my own hiding spot carefully. I could see the closest searcher through the trees, coming steadily closer, and I positioned myself in his path, crouched in a thick clump of bushes. Then it was just a waiting game, staying tense and on alert as I listened to him getting closer and closer. I let him pull even with me, held my breath as he wandered closer to my hiding spot, but he didn't inspect anything very carefully. Why should he? He thought he was looking for Andalites, not a human in a cammo jacket.

Unfortunately, I couldn't shoot him with the darts. We knew that it took a couple seconds for the men to pass out after being shot, plenty of time to sound an alarm. My target moved slightly past me, looking every way but behind him, and as silently as I could I stood up. I timed it so the noise of his own movements would cover mine, until I was close enough to grab him.

I flung my arm around his neck and pulled tight, cutting off any chance he had at calling for help. With my other hand, I plunged the ballistic syringe of tranquilizer into his thigh. The man fought me, but I didn't let him turn his head or even relent enough for him to breathe. After a few seconds he went limp, either from being chocked or being doped, and I lowered him carefully to the ground.

I crouched next to him and waited, tense, on alert for any sign that the move had been noticed. But no one came to investigate and no shouts were called. The sounds of the other searchers moved on past us. They'd notice their downed comrade soon enough, but we probably had several minutes until then.

Off to my left, I heard the muffled sounds of a struggle. Rachel and Tobias, taking out their target. But if I could hear them, so could others. I rolled my man under a bush and ran for the others. They had flung a jacket over his head and Rachel had her hand over his mouth, but he wasn't going down. I saw the problem immediately. The tranq they'd stabbed him with was still full; being a ballistic syringe, it wouldn't empty unless it hit with enough force. I pointed to it and made a violent stabbing motion, both of them were occupied with keeping the man from escaping enough to yell for help. I darted in, grabbed the syringe from his thigh, and jabbed him in the other thigh with all the force I could muster.

No doubt he'd wake up with a brutal bruise there, but it did the trick. After a few seconds, he slumped to the ground as well. Rachel unwound her jacket from around his head and started running back to the others without a word; Tobias and I followed.

The commotion had drawn attention. All up and down the line of searchers, people were yelling back and forth to each other. Calls of 'what was that' and 'are you okay' and 'did you hear something' rang out. It would only be a matter of seconds before they discovered there was a hole in their line and went to investigate.

The other three were already out of their hiding spot and running toward us when we arrived. Even better. We reversed direction and all ran for the farm. We had to be out of sight before they noticed the two downed men or the whole plan fell apart.

Ax raced ahead of us, faster than anyone now that silence wasn't the biggest priority. He stayed just head of us, a scout, careful not leave us behind.

We weren't fast enough. I heard the sound of another person crashing through the brush behind us, catching up fast. I signaled for Ax to keep going and for the others to hide, but too slow. To slow to avoid being seen.

It was Bull, the enormous man who was in charge. I saw him about the same time he saw me, as I paused to try and look for a hiding spot where there were none. His eyes went wide with shock as he realized that he'd been chasing a group of humans and, rather than call for help, he simply made an incoherently furious noise and charged at me.

I ignored Marco tugging at my arm and turned to face him head on. He out-classed me in weight, but I had height and reach on him. I figured I could take him.

He must have figured the same thing, too, because instead of finishing his charge he pulled out another of the dark red alien guns and fired at me. I ducked, but even so it was only his bad aim that saved me from being fried. I smelled charred wood behind me, but didn't dare turn to look. Stupid, _stupid_ of me to forget that he was likely to be armed. I rolled the side and came up in a crouch, feeling for my own weapon and fumbling as I got it out. The grip of it had been modified. It wasn't just like a pistol grip. It _was_ a pistol grip, fused right onto the alien metal. The trigger and safety catch were right where they should have been.

Bull changed direction and headed for Cassie, who was closest to him. I raised the weapon and fired.

There was no kick, which threw me off. I didn't see anything come out of the gun, no bullet or light or laser. Just a slight distortion, like a heat wave, and over Bull's shoulder a tree branch snapped off and fell with a crash, the ends charred black. Bull turned and aimed at me again, but I didn't give him a chance to fire. I shot again, caught him on the arm. Again, hit him in the chest. Again, missed completely. It didn't matter; after the chest shot he fell.

I stood there for a long, impossibly long silent moment, just staring at the spot where Bull's head had been. He didn't get up again, didn't move, didn't groan or make any sound. I smelled the sickeningly sweet, slightly metallic odor of burned flesh.

"Jake, come _on_." Marco pulled the gun out of my hand and bodily shoved me into action again.

I couldn't tear my eyes off that prone body, lying in a heap on the forest floor. He was clearly dead. Part of me thought I should go over and look at him, face the man I'd just killed, but most of me wanted to hurl at the thought. I kept watching it as we ran around it, but I gave it a wide berth. Marco stayed behind me, prodding me forward, pulling Cassie along as well. I didn't notice until that moment that she'd been staring, too.

"Run, you idiots."

Run. Right. More were coming, and we had to escape. After a few fumbling steps I pulled myself together and started running on my own. In a few seconds, we caught up to the others, and all together we raced for the farm.

We reached it without further mishap. We overshot the farm on purpose, running wide of it to the north and then doubling back to arrive from the other side, just in case we were still being followed. If anyone had followed us after Bull, though, they were absolutely silent about it.

Cassie took Ax into one of the barns and promised to hide him there. Then Marco insisted that we all split up. If anyone came to investigate the farm, it would look pretty suspicious to have us all hanging around for no reason. I didn't like it, but Cassie assured me that she would be fine.

Even still, I was reluctant to leave. As the others headed to their cars, I hung back and took Cassie's hand. "If they come here-"

"If they show up I'll give them a run around. They won't find him."

"But if they don't bother to ask before they-"

"Jake, get out of here. I'll be fine. They've been doing a secret invasion so far. They're not going to risk all that by assaulting people."

She had a point. For all we called it a 'farm' still, The Center was really just the farmhouse and last few acres remaining from an actual farm. It sat at the edge of the forest, but in the other direction was a developed area, close enough to be in sight and earshot if anything violent went down.

"You'll call?" I asked. "You'll call me and tell me you're okay?"

"Promise. Now go."

"Don't go anywhere alone. Stay in the house with your parents, or with Josh or Ari." The two part-time employees who worked at the Center with Cassie and her dad.

"I will. Now please, Jake, you have to go."

I hugged her on impulse and hurried to Marco and my rented car. He made an impatient 'let's move' motion as I approached.

The whole way back to Marco's apartment, we were both silent. A few times he tried to say something, but I cut him off until he got the hint that I didn't want to talk. As we approached the apartment, he invited me to stay the night and I agreed with a grunt.

My head felt so full I thought it might split. The whole day was too much to take in at once. Part of me knew I would have to process it eventually. The half-made plans we'd overheard at Chuck E Cheese, the fact that the Yeerks were taking children, the confirmation about my commander, Ax's arrival, the police. The hundred-million things that each one of those things implied, the options they represented. The demand clamoring in my conscience that something be _done_ about all of it.

All that paled next to the memory of that scent of charred skin.

I'd accepted in the past that I'd probably killed before. I was a soldier, an infantryman. I'd been part of firefights, I'd been involved in raids and assaults. There was a wonderful, handy loophole to many acts of combat, though. In the confusion, in the mess of noise and smoke and orders, it was always easy to lose track of which shot went where. There was a huge difference between knowing, unequivocally, than your bullet had killed a man and knowing that _someone_'s bullet had killed them. That ability to share blame, to fool myself into thinking it might not have been me, that had kept me on even ground for years.

Now my even ground was gone. I didn't have any illusions this time. I didn't have anyone to share my guilt with. All I had was the crushing memory of that smell and of that body lying in a crumpled heap. It was too much to even think about, so I just numbly followed Marco into the apartment after we parked.

Once inside, Marco headed straight to the fridge and pulled out two beers. He gave me a challenging look as he passed one off to me, but I wasn't about to complain about drinking after a day like that.

I was on my third beer before either of us said anything.

"There wasn't anything you could have done different," Marco told me.

"I know."

"He saw us. He saw our faces. If he'd-"

"For fuck's sake, I _know_. Doesn't make it any better anyway."

In fact, it made it worse. The knowledge that, if it had to happen all over again, I still would have shot him. Letting him live would have been too big a risk. He'd be able to identify us to the rest of the Yeerks if we left him alive, and taking him captive would have slowed us down too much to escape. The moment he'd seen me, it had become a matter of his life or ours.

And the cold, heartless part of me that knew that made me physically ill.

"Do you get like this after every fight?" Marco asked. I reached for the closest thing, a magazine, and tossed it at him. "No, I mean really?"

"Not all of them."

Just the really bad ones. I didn't feel like explaining at that moment the myriad of ways I reacted to a battle. Or the fact that what we'd just come out of wasn't actually a battle. There was a world of difference between running one step ahead of death and lighting up a bit of shock-and-awe.

"Wasn't even really a fight," I pointed out. "Don't you have anything harder than beer?"

(0)(0)(0)(0)(0)

An hour later, Cassie called to say she and Ax were fine. A police officer had shown up to ask if they'd seen anything usual, feeding out some story and teenagers pulling some prank with firecrackers. Fortunately, he'd talked to her father, who told the officer with a straight face that he knew nothing about it. We agreed to meet the next day and discuss things, provided things looked safe enough on her end.

Marco managed to distract me the rest of the day with a combination of tequila and wild speculation about what everything we'd learned actually meant. Without access to Ax, without enough information, and with far too much alcohol, nothing we came up with made any sense, but it did at least keep me from thinking about any bodies left in a pile in the forest.

If I'd been the type, I would have hugged Marco for that. The last thing I needed was to dwell on what I'd done. I knew that much about myself, at least.

Unfortunately, we'd started drinking pretty early in the day. Even at a relatively moderate pace, Marco passed out in his Laz-E-Boy shortly before it turned dark. I took over his bed and did the same. Or tried to. Every time I closed my eyes, I pictured Bull right at the moment I'd shot him. I played it over and over again in my mind, unable to turn off the constant playback. Nothing I did could stop it, nothing I told myself could make it end. Again and again I watched myself take aim and fire the alien weapon, four times, no hesitation. I told myself that he was gunning for Cassie, that I had to protect the others, that if I hadn't done it we all would have died, and still it did nothing to halt that never-ending replay.

I must have fallen asleep. The sound of a phone woke me from a dream that was no different from my waking thoughts. I fumbled around in the dark until I realized my phone was still in my pants and pulled it out. "'Lo?"

"Jake?"

"Cassie?" I squinted at the beside clock. 12:14 am. "Is something wrong?"

"No. I mean, not...not really. I just...um, never mind. I'm sorry I woke you up."

"Cassie, wait." I couldn't let her hang up the phone, not sounding like she did. I could almost hear the tears. "Can...can I come over?"

"Please."


	9. Chapter 9

((AN - This chapter is edited to remain within the posted rating. There is a rated M version for those who are so inclined, posted on my LJ: off-the-tracks. livejournal. com /9965. html. Not reading the smutty version will not detract from understanding the plot, but it's there if you want it.))

(0)(0)(0)(0)(0)

Cassie still technically lived with her parents, but when they'd built the new Center buildings, they included a suit of rooms connected to the offices to give her some privacy. I parked close to her door, still mildly tipsy and somewhere between grateful and worried that I hadn't been pulled over for it. In the field between the Center and the trees, I thought I saw Ax galloping, but when I looked again he was gone. Marco's warning that he would run off given the first chance rang in my head, but I couldn't really bring myself to care.

She opened the door before I had a chance to knock. She wore my old basketball jersey and a pair of cotton pants for pajamas and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. "You came."

"Uh-huh." I just nodded dumbly, staring at her, stamping down the urge to wrap her up and never let go.

"Oh. Um, come on in." She stepped aside so I could enter and shut the door behind me. Her suite was really one giant room, with a partition put up between the bed and the sitting area. She had a microwave and a mini-fridge instead of a kitchen and a shared a bathroom with the office on the other side, where we'd been earlier to pick up the rifles. Everything was neat and tidy, decorated in earthy tones, but a little bland. As if she didn't spend much time in the place and didn't care much what it looked like.

"I didn't know you still had that," I said, nodding to the jersey. I'd only been on the team one year, and I'd been the worst player. But sitting on the bench while the team won state championships meant I still got a jersey out of deal, and since I'd been dating Cassie at the time...

"Yeah, I...ah, I found it the other day." She played with the hem of the jersey and wouldn't look up at me.

It was moronic, the way we danced around each other. On some level I'd always known that. But today especially, after everything that had happened, it just seemed even more pointless than ever to stay away from her, to lie about the fact that I still felt drawn to her. Hell, brain stealing aliens could knock down our door at any moment. I couldn't care that we'd had a fight in high school, or that she would never be able to deal with my military lifestyle. Three days ago the biggest thing hanging between us had been the fact that I would move away in a few months and that she was happiest staying put. Now?

Now it didn't seem like near a good enough reason not to kiss her. I caught her face in both hands and leaned down to press my mouth against hers. She wrapped both her arms around me without the slightest hesitation, as if she'd been waiting for just that, and for several glorious minutes we stayed like that.

I didn't notice when embracing turned to clinging, or when she stopped kissing me and instead pressed her face into my shoulder. I nudged and pulled at her, walking us over to the couch without letting go of her in the slightest, and sat down with her gathered in my lap.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, her hands twisted into my shirt. "I just-"

"I know."

I did know. There's something about fear, about real fear, that sticks with a body. Not the kind of fear that can be laughed off once the danger has passed, but the kind that tears you down and makes you realize for the first time that you're mortal, than you can be hurt, that you're in the middle of something that could chew you up and spit you out and not even care. It's a good kind of fear, a useful kind, but there's no getting around the fact that it leaves you vulnerable and hollow afterward.

And it doesn't ever go away. I knew what she was going through. There were many nights in Afghanistan or Iraq where I'd stay up all night with my platoon joking and playing cards, just because none of us could stand to be alone with our thoughts. The infantryman's version of sitting in someone's lap, I suppose. Even now, even having felt it before, I wanted to curl up around Cassie and let her weight and her warmth ground me in reality.

"Jake?" Her voice sounded tight. I wondered if she'd been crying before I'd arrived.

"Shh." I hugged her tighter, ran my hands up and down her arms slowly. "It'll pass."

"Do you...get used to doing stuff like that?"

"Not really. You just learn how to deal with it."

She wrapped her arms around my neck and rested her forehead against my collarbone. "I can't get it out of my head. I keep thinking about how anything, any little thing, could have gone wrong and we'd all be dead right now. Or worse."

"Yeah." I pressed my cheek against the top of her head. "That's normal. It'll...it'll fade."

It wouldn't ever stop. I had moments still where I would think back on the various things I'd done and wonder what would happen if it had gone just a little different. I'd already accepted that Bull would be added to that list. It wouldn't ever stop, but eventually it would fade, and I wouldn't obsess about it.

Although that wouldn't happen any time soon.

She turned her head and her lips brushed against my neck. Not content with that, I put my fingers under her chin and made her look up at me so I could kiss her again. God, I'd missed that. Missed holding her and feeling her hands creep around my neck and pull me down lower. She used to always joke that I was entirely too tall to kiss comfortably. I leaned into her and held her tighter.

She gave a muffled squeak of protest and shoved at my chest, causing me to let go suddenly. As soon as my arms were no longer around her, she jumped off my lap, her cheeks flushed, one hand pressed against her lips. "What are we doing?" she asked, more to herself than to me.

"Thought it was pretty obvious."

Cassie just shook her head and wouldn't look me in the eye. I felt oddly cold and breathless without her body. I wanted to reach out and touch her, more than anything, but I knew better than to pressure her.

A very hard temptation to resist, since I also knew all the things that would make Cassie turn boneless and start purring.

"Cassie-"

"No. No, we can't keep doing this every time you come home. It's...it's not healthy, Jake. Every time. And then you're gone in a few weeks and I can't...I can't..." She wrapped her arms around her midsection and turned away from me. She might as well have slapped me in the face.

I didn't mean for things to turn out like this. I'd always attributed our first break up to the fact that we'd been high school sweethearts; those relationships never last. If only we'd been able to leave it as that, but every few years, when we both found ourselves home at the same time... But it only ever ended one way: a night or two together, then a lot of regrets and me on a plane heading back to my unit. We always told ourselves that we'd just keep it platonic, just be friends. We always failed.

"Do you want me to leave?" I asked quietly.

She shook her head 'no' but didn't say anything.

I got off the couch and went to her, touched her gently on the shoulder. She leaned back against me automatically and I hugged her from behind. "It doesn't have to be some big, sweeping relationship statement, you know. It could just be...what we need tonight. And that's it."

She tensed and stayed silent for a long moment, and I worried I'd insulted her horribly. When she pulled away I let her go, but all she did was turn around and wrap her arms around my neck, pull me down to her level. When she kissed me, she poured so much unspoken need and desire into it that I thought for a moment the room would spontaneously combust.

Never breaking contact with her lips, I pulled her steadily backward to the bed.

(0)(0)(0)(0)(0)

Early the next morning, I woke to a pounding at the door. I groaned and rolled over, ready to tell Cassie to go answer it and make them go away, but I was alone in the bed. Grumpily, I burrowed further under the covers. I wasn't about to go answer it myself and have to explain to Cassie's father why I was in his daughters room without pants on.

"Jake, damnit, I know you're in there. Your truck's out here!"

It was Marco. I would have preferred Cassie's father. But since he didn't seem inclined to stop pounding, I dragged myself out of bed and pulled my pants on. I couldn't find my shirt, but I did find the basketball jersey, so I put that on instead.

"I'm coming; hold your horses." I opened the door and found Marco wearing a comically disappointed look, as if he couldn't figure out whether to rip me a new one or start snarking at me. "What'ya want?"

"Honestly, you could have left a note or something." Marco muscled his way past me into the room. "Thought you'd run off to do something _really_ stupid."

"Why...are you here?"

"Oh, come on. It couldn't have been that good. Did you forget we're all supposed to meet here and figure out what to do with ET?"

I hadn't forgotten. Not exactly. I just hadn't quite remembered yet. "Oh. Is it time for that already?"

"No, I just showed up early to make sure you weren't off trying to go mano-a-mano with your captain or some such. Where's Cassie?"

"Dunno. Get out of here before she comes back."

"Why?"

"Because I know you and you'll make an ass of yourself as soon as you see her."

Marco just grinned impudently at me. "You guys shouldn't give me so much to work with."

"Work with what?" We both turned to see Cassie in the open doorway, pulling off a pair of muddy overboots. "'Morning, Marco. I thought we agreed to meet at noon?"

"We did. I just-" I kicked him in the shin and he reconsidered whatever he was about to say. "So, I'll see you then, yeah?" He waved as he all but sauntered out the door.

Once he was gone and Cassie was in the room, I tried to lean down and give her a kiss, but she turned her head. I kissed her cheek instead, confused. "Something wrong?" I grimaced and added, "I mean, more than there was already?"

"No. Just...would like to keep things in perspective, that's all."

I felt like she'd punched me in the gut, but I backed up all the same and didn't try to kiss her again. She must have been more offended than I'd thought by me 'just what we need' comment the night before. I didn't regret what had happened, couldn't regret it, but at the same time it hadn't solved anything between us. And as good as the sex had been, as great a comfort for both of us, it wasn't all of what we really needed.

"Yeah. Okay." I scratched my neck awkwardly. "So, is Ax still with us?"

"I saw him out this morning. Told him he should probably stay hidden in case Dad or one of the others comes in early. It's my day for the morning rounds, so they shouldn't be coming in, but just in case."

I nodded absently, not really processing much of what she'd said. "At least he's still around. Hopefully we can work something out."

Although _what_ we would work out was still unclear. We'd lost the ship, which would have been a huge boon in convincing others our story was true. After considering it for a while, I didn't think we could convince Ax to come out to the rest of humanity. Even if we controlled the setting and introduced him to just a few critical people, I couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't go wrong. That he wouldn't land in Area 51, or whatever. I was equally doubtful that we'd get any of his technology without stealing it; if he carried things that couldn't fall into enemy hands, it would probably be an even worse infraction for him to give it away to us.

"I should probably go home and change," I said, feeling beat and defeated. Fighting and drinking and sex all piled on top of each other had not exactly left me refreshed. Or clean.

Before she could make an equally awkward reply, something slammed hard against the door. I pulled Cassie behind me reflexively, but it was just Marco, barging in again once he'd stopped long enough to use the door handle. "Guys, come on, you have to see this."

He ran off again before either of us could yell at him and we had no choice but to follow.

We ran into the barn where Ax was hiding. Cassie had given him one of the storage rooms in the back where the other Center workers weren't likely to stumble across him. Only, when we arrived at the room, we didn't see Ax. Instead we found...

Another Marco. Stark naked and looking like he would fall over at any second.

I looked back and forth between the two Marcos, completely stumped, until it finally occurred to me. "Aximili? Is that you?"

"Theeeeese bodies are not-t-t stable. Able."

Cassie covered a noise that could have been a giggle or a squeak and walked quickly out of the room.

"How...?" I looked between the two again, waiting for an explanation. Ax seemed preoccupied with teaching himself to walk.

"I was heading out, and he comes up and asks if he can borrow my DNA," Marco explained. "So I, well I didn't really know what that meant, but I said yes, and then he grabbed my hand and...and...well, and then he did that."

"Did?"

"Turned into me! Look at him!"

I did look. He'd more or less figured out how to stand without falling over and was now preoccupied with trying to look in multiple directions at once. "Your oth-th-ther friend said I would not want to -nt-to nnnntttto - want to be discovered. I thought -th th- it best to take a human appearance."

"But...you...turned into...you..." I pointed first at Ax, then at Marco. I knew what had happened, I just couldn't quite accept it yet. Even with the result standing in front of me.

"Technically, I assumed the form of an exact biological copy while leaving the original organism unharmed and autonomous."

"Hey, I'm not an organism!" Marco thought about what he'd said, then scowled. "I mean, I am, but don't call me one."

Ax tipped his head to the side and almost fell over. "Is this not an accept -pt-pt-pt- able way to avoid -oooiid- detection? Kshn. K-k-k-shun."

"Stop doing that. And no, you can't go around looking just like Marco. People will notice that."

"Especially if you go around as Pantsless Marco," my friend pointed out. Although he didn't sound particularly embarrassed by the prospect.

Personally, I didn't see that he had over-much to brag about.

Cassie came in just then carrying a pair of faded overalls. She held them out to Ax, carefully not looking down, but Ax just stared at the clothes and then back over at me and Marco. She left as we helped Ax figure out how to dress.

"Man, he can't stay like that," Marco said as we stepped back to see the result. "I'm insulted just looking at me."

I had to admit, Ax in Marco's stocky frame and shirtless overalls did look like a Hollywood hick. It wasn't exactly my top priority at the moment, though.

"So, is that...that changing into things, is that something all Andalites can do?" I vividly remembered the monster Visser Three had turned into on the night Elfangor had died.

"No. The tech-tek-k-k-technology was only discovered four and quart-quarter years ago." Ax paused and looked up again, though the act made him stumble back a step. "About thirty five of your years."

"Technology?" Marco asked. "You did that with _science_?"

"Of course."

Marco had no come-back to such a bland reply.

Cassie came back into the store room, making sure that Ax was dressed before she fully entered. "I call the other two," she told us. "We might as well get started early."


	10. Chapter 10

Rachel and Tobias arrived within minutes of each other, and by that point Ax had taught himself how to walk without falling over too much. He flatly refused to wear the shoes we found for him. He said that pants were unnatural enough, but there was no way he'd cover his _feet_, as if feet were something special. We didn't press the issue.

"I don't think I can handle two Marcos," Rachel declared, looking between the copy and the real thing.

{There is only one Marco,} Ax pointed out. He'd switched back to thought-speak to avoid stuttering, but he kept making _plok-plok_ sounds with his mouth even while 'talking.' {I have copied nothing besides his physical form. But if it is really such an abhorrent occurrence, I can adjust the form by adding in other DNA samples.}

"You can do what?" I asked.

{I can take two or more samples of DNA and combine them into a genetically unique morph. Would that be in keeping with the social mores of your culture?}

"Erm, I think so." I had no idea how our 'social mores' would react to that proposal, but at least he wouldn't run around looking like someone's twin. "You can use mine." I offered up my hand.

"Nu-uh." Marco slapped my hand down. "That'll be even weirder if he looks like both of us. How would you explain that?"

{It would be best if I could take as wide a sample as possible. Preferably from all of you, if it is permissible.}

After a moment's hesitation, we all agreed. Ax took our hands, one by one, and did...something. When it came my turn, I felt dizzy and sleepy at once, as if the floor was spinning away from me and it made perfect sense to sit down, just for a moment. As soon as he took his hand away, the feeling stopped. The others all got a similar look, all except Cassie, who jerked a little when he touched her.

After Ax finished collecting his 'samples', he sat on a box and closed his eyes. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then his features started to shift. He grew taller, and his skin turned a different shade of brown. Not lighter but...different. His face seemed to melt before it solidified into a new shape.

"That is seriously freaky," Marco offered.

"Is this-s-s not an accept-pt-able form?" Ax went cross-eyed trying to look at his own nose.

"You look fine," Rachel assured him. "Kind of cute."

"There's something just so narcissistic about that comment." Marco grinned at Rachel as he said it, incorrigible to the last. "But really, Ax, how do you do that?"

{The process is hard to explain to those without sufficient background in xenomorphic fields,} Ax said rather uncomfortably. His words came with an odd undertone, like they were being told to all of us by an outside party. I guessed that Ax didn't have 'sufficient background' to understand it either.

"Well it's still very impressive," Cassie insisted.

Ax perked up. {The technology has advanced significantly. As recently as a few seasons ago, I would have had to return to my own body before taking a new morph.}

"Is this the same technology Visser Three uses?" I asked, bringing the ugly image of Elfangor's death into the conversation.

{No,} Ax insisted hotly. {He took his host many years ago. He still uses the original version of the Device. It has...significant limitations.}

"Didn't seem very limited the other night," Marco muttered, but only loud enough for me to hear.

I ignored him. "Well, you looking human will probably help with, ah, with whatever we decide to do."

{What do you mean? There is nothing to decide. I must get back to the Fleet.}

"That's not exactly a plan," Marco pointed out. "Especially since you blew up your ship."

"We'll just have to find another one," Tobias said. "Apparently there's all sorts of aliens on this planet. Can you fly a Yeerk ship?"

Ax's nostrils flared like he was scowling, but his mouth remained perfectly still. The effect was more than a little odd. {I know the basic mechanics of it, yes.}

"Well that's it then." Rachel clapped her hands together. "We'll steal a couple of ships. Alien boy here can take one home and we'll take one and park it in front of the President. That ought to be proof enough, don't you think?"

"And I repeat, that's not a _plan_," Marco insisted. "Is this a foreign concept to all of you?"

"Well, it's the start of one," Tobias said, whining only a little bit.

"Where are we going to find a ship?" Marco asked. "Or two, rather. How are we going to get it away from the Yeerks? How do you plan on flying it without crashing? What are you going to do after landing so that the Secret Service doesn't shoot you in the face as soon as come out of the ship?"

"All valid questions," Cassie said, cutting off both Marco's litany and Tobias's rebuttal. "And obviously we'll figure them out before we do anything."

I realized with a sinking feeling what that meant. I was not going to be able to avoid tailing my boss some more. "We need to keep doing what we've been doing. Tailing the Yeerks we know of, finding out everything we can. Then we can come up with a course of action."

{The Yeerks will keep most of their craft in orbit,} Ax told us. {To avoid detection. Any that are kept landside will be stored in a remote location, away from native habitations. Few people except the pilots will visit them, and finding a pilot and trailing them to the correct location would prove...very difficult.}

Rachel cocked her head at Ax for a moment, then grinned at the rest of the group. "We should have asked him to start with. What else do you know about these Yeerks?"

Ax stood up straighter, his posture proud despite the slightly odd tilt to his shoulders. As if his Andalite habits and his human body were fighting about which position meant 'don't screw with me.' {I have made it my life's work to fight the Yeerks. I am well informed about their habits.}

I tried unsuccessfully to hide a grin, both at his actual words and at the tone that went with them. I'd rarely seen anyone so proud of themselves.

"We'll, that puts you a step above us," Rachel told him. She caught my eye and grinned; she was pandering to his ego. "We could really use your help trying to figure this out."

Ax hesitated for a moment, his eyes shifting rapidly between everyone in the room. {Well, naturally the success of any plan would depend on everyone here being as well informed as possible.} It was clear from the undertones of his words that he meant 'well informed about the _Yeerks_.' I could almost hear him tell us not to even try asking about the Andalite military. Subtle. Almost like it had been my own thought. I wondered if he did it on purpose, or if it was just a byproduct of telepathic communication.

"We wouldn't dream of trying to pull out anything you're not willing to tell us, Aximili," Rachel went on, all smooth tones and easy smiles. She was in full lawyer-mode now, trying to put the 'witness' at ease. I knew enough to stand back and let her do it.

{It wouldn't be relevant to the situation anyway.}

"See? Exactly. I take it Earth isn't the first planet they've tried to take on the sly?"

{No, there were others.}

I got a brief impression of three other planets and three other races. Races that Ax had little regard for, races that were rather violent. I didn't know their names, but just the phrase 'others' gave me a clear picture of each race and flashes of strange worlds. Purple skies and moss-covered mountains. Literally boiling seas. Nomadic tribes that waged war against each other, operating under an uneasy truce when the Yeerks landed.

Rachel blinked and pressed one hand to her forehead before continuing. I could hardly blame her; communicating in concepts was not getting any easier as time went on. "And, in your best estimation, will they operate the same way here?"

{There are some slight differences in the situation, but I suspect they will, yes.}

"Slight?" Marco asked. "How is it 'slight'? You said - er, well, sort of said that the previous guys were all nomads. We're a hundred-thousand-person sized town. That seems like a pretty fundamental difference to me when you're talking about taking shit over."

{And yet, it is not.} Ax looked over at Marco with only one eye which, since he was still in a human form, succeeded in making him look more creepy than intimidating. {They will begin by establishing a strong base in a particular tribe-}

"Town," Marco interrupted. "We're not a tribe, we're a town."

I nudged Marco with my elbow to get him to shut up and he glowered, crossed his arms over his chest, and didn't say anything further.

{They will select a tribe to be the base from which they will launch a full-scale attack. Obviously, they have chosen this one.}

"Do you know why they would pick a town like ours?" Rachel prompted.

{They have always picked tribes that are neutral, small enough that changes will go unnoticed, but close enough to powerful parties that they can expand easily.}

That fit with what I'd already guessed. There wasn't a conflict for our town to be considered 'neutral' in, but we certainly fit the bill in all other regards.

{They'll keep a low profile until they are sure of their defensible position, then they'll target key leaders, starting with the most local and expanding planet-wide.}

"And then what?" Rachel asked when he hesitated.

{What do you mean?}

"I mean, after they've got all the key leaders, then what do they do?"

Ax blinked at her. {And then they lose. They've never managed to successfully take over a planet in this manner.}

"So...you mean the natives find out? Fight them off somehow?" Tobias leaned forward from his seat on a stack of boxes, a painfully hopeful look on his face.

{No. They never find out. But we know, and we stop them.}

Ax clamped his thoughts down _hard_ on the word 'stop'. What came through was very clinical, just an impression of clean victory and a resigned feeling as the Andalites moved on to the next target. His lack of a clearer picture told more than it didn't. I had the sneaking suspicion that I would not like finding out how they 'stopped' the Yeerks after they'd gained a foothold somewhere.

Beside me, Marco must have come to the same conclusion. He clenched and unclenched his fists in his lap, but he didn't make any comment.

"Then why would they keep trying?" I asked. I didn't like enemies that kept performing a failed tactic over and over. It wasn't natural.

{Because if they could get it to work, the rewards would outweigh any risk. There are far more Yeerks in the Empire than there are available hosts. They are constantly trying to take new planets with a minimal loss of life, so that they can harvest more able-bodied hosts. Your planet is ideal for them. Five million new hosts would bolster their numbers considerably.}

"Five million?" Cassie repeated.

{Yes. Don't you know your own planet's population?}

We all stared at him for a moment, shocked to silence, before Marco started laughing. A humorless laugh that had a kind of desperate edge to it.

"Either someone lied to you or someone got their numbers seriously crossed," he said between chuckles. "Because we passed the six _billion_ mark a few years ago."

It was Ax's turned to be shocked to silence. He focused on Marco with a gaze that seemed intense compared to his habit of looking everywhere at once. {You... No, surely you must be mistaken.}

"He's not," I said. "Six billion."

{It's... But... That doesn't... How is that even sustainable?}

I shrugged. "We seem to manage it." I gave Ax a few moments to process the fact before I asked the question that had be bugging at the back of my mind. "So, with billions instead of millions on the line, would they be more likely to take more risks? Step up their game, try and speed things up?"

Marco abruptly stopped laughing and started coughing. The others looked at me with shocked faces. Even Ax looked uncomfortably surprised by my question.

{I suppose...it would not be unreasonable to assume that.}

"Well then it's more important than ever that we find a way to stop them _now_," Tobias said. "Apparently we don't know what they'll do if they get dug in enough."

{Their biggest weakness at this stage is their need to feed.}

He didn't have to explain 'feed' to us. His thoughts carried the concept. Every three days the Yeerk would have to leave their human host and return to the sludge of a pool, to soak up the artificial rays of a small-scale sun. Without those rays, the Yeerk would die.

"I'll say," Marco said and gave a low whistle. "How do they get anything done with a hamstring like that?"

{They will have to ferry the hosts back and forth to the Pool ship in orbit. They will have a transport ship leave from a nearby location, one easily accessible to the hosts but out of sight of the natives.}

"And no one notices when people start disappearing for random trips to space?" I asked. Surely if Polk and Hash and Cleever had started moonwalking twice a week, I would have noticed _that_.

{The trip would only take a few hours between departure and return. Is that an unusually long time to be absent in your culture?}

I would have made some remark about the clear sarcasm in his voice, but Rachel started talking instead. "Well why didn't you mention this at the start? We can follow any one of the Yeerks we know about and get our hands on a ship."

{Unlikely,} Ax told her in a cool tone that made her bristle. {These would be mid-sized ferry ships, unwieldy, designed to transport one or two hundred bodies at a time to orbit and no father. They would not have the capacity to transport me all the way back to the Fleet.}

"Well isn't that just too bad for you?" she spat. "Because they would serve _our_ purposes pretty nicely."

Ax was visibly taken aback by her insinuation, and despite the fact that we still needed Ax to be agreeable and on our side, in that moment I would have readily backed Rachel up. He'd made it clear throughout the conversation that he had nothing but his own escape from the planet in mind, and that could be potentially fatal for all of us. He would have no problem continuing to act like that unless we made it clear that we wouldn't be taken for granted. Ax looked over at me and I didn't give him an inch.

"We want to help you, Aximili," I said, using my very best 'sergeant' tone. "And we will, to the best of our abilities. But there's a lot more at stake here than just your orders, no matter how important they are to you."

He had the good grace to break eye contact first.

"Look," Cassie said. "There's no reason to think we can't find a suitable ship while running down this...this ferry thing. Let's get a better idea of what we're dealing with before making and dismissing plans. We're just shooting in the dark, here. When we know more, then we can nail down the details."

Her suggestion made sense, and more to the point, it was enough to keep Rachel, Ax, and myself from arguing some more. Rachel brushed some imaginary dirt off her jeans and shrugged, while Ax became very interested in his hands. I couldn't tell if it was because his hands were honestly interesting to him, or because he was avoiding everyone's gaze.

"Alright," I said. "So we observe. You guys with Chapman, me with my people."

"You're going to need some help," Marco pointed out, his voice and expression so mild that I couldn't find any reason to snap at him.

I knew he was right, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I had to take care of my command on my own. They were _my_ people, after all. _My_ commander. _My_ First Sergeant. I had a responsibility to watch their backs, and I'd already failed on that once without realizing it. The others were civilians; they wouldn't understand.

But that didn't change the fact that I couldn't watch any one of the Yeerks we know about - much less all three of them - without some kind of help.

"I got some vacation days due me," Marco continued in that same bland voice. "I could say I'm out there to visit."

"Take blue-boy over there along," Rachel suggested. "You two could have a grunt-off."

I shot her a glare, to which she smiled innocently. "I don't think that would be the best idea."

"I'll take him," Tobias offered. He shrugged when everyone looked at him. "What? I live alone, I've got space, and I only have to work a few hours tomorrow." He looked over at Ax. "If you don't mind being seen in a Pinto, I can show you around the area. Maybe we can figure out where they're launching those transport thingies from."

{What's a Pinto?}

"He should probably go shopping first before he goes out in public," Rachel put in.

{Shopping for what?}

"Are you volunteering for that?" I asked Rachel.

She looked Ax up and down with one hand on her chin, like she was assessing a guilty client. "Yeah. I think we can work something out."

{Shopping for what?} Ax asked again, sounding a little nervous.

I checked my watch. It was barely nine in the morning. "Alright, well, you and Tobias can take care of that. Cassie, you've got the Center until noon, right?"

She nodded.

"Okay, so you four work out how to track down and keep an eye on Chapman. Marco and I will head back to base and set up there. We'll start counting three days from this afternoon and before the end of that we should at least know how they're getting off the planet. We can figure something else out from there."

{Shopping for _what_?}

[[A/N - I am sorry for the long delay. When I started this project I was writing at the speed of a NaNo-er on crack, mostly due to some personal issues and the avoidance thereof. Needless to say, I got a little burned out. I have not abandoned this fic, nor do I intend to at any point in the foreseeable future. I will be putting out chapters at a much more reasonable rate, though. Thank you for your patience and your lovely reviews and comments.]]


	11. Chapter 11

Marco packed like he was traveling to Tibet instead of an hour down the road to my house. His suitcase would barely fit in the trunk of the little sedan I'd rented, but things went better once I turned it in and got my truck back.

"What the hell do you think we'll be doing that you need to pack so much?"

"I don't know. I like to be prepared."

"For what, the apocalypse?"

"It could happen."

A second after he said it, we both realized that 'apocalypse' was actually a real possibility now and it put a damper on any further bickering. We made the rest of the ride to my house in silence.

I lived in a housing community on post, a neighborhood of identical, dun-colored duplexes that were almost scary in their uniformity. A few people kept yard decorations or flowers in planters in an attempt to break up the monotony. My roommate and I had a large pot filled with rocks and a fake fern since neither of us could keep a plant alive.

Marco had been to visit before so he wasted no time claiming the couch in the living room. I check to make sure that Schneider, my roommate, wasn't home before I grabbed a pair of Cokes from the fridge and went to join him.

"He's not telling us everything, you know." Marco took the can from me without looking.

"We haven't given him much reason to." I didn't like the situation any more than Marco did, but I could at least understand Ax's position. Stuck in a hostile environment and dependent on strangers, it was no wonder he played his cards close to the chest.

"Doesn't change the facts. If we don't find a way to pick that boy's head, we could all end up killed. This shit's bad enough without us running around in the dark being led by some guy who doesn't care what happens to us."

"He's not leading us," I said firmly.

"Right. You are."

"I'm not either."

Marco chuckled and didn't answer. He might as well have called me silly and patted me on the head.

The front door crashed open and Marco flinched, but I didn't. Schneider never could figure out how to enter a room quietly.

I'd lived with Schneider since moving back to California. He wasn't in my company and we'd been strangers, but such was the lot of singles living in on-post housing; we never got to pick who we lived with. In the past year we'd become good friends, though, despite his tendency toward exuberance.

"Hey, Marco," he said as he came in and noticed our guest. "What're you doing here?" They'd met on plenty of previous occasions.

"I came to steal your couch. I'm going to stake out here and name it Marconasia." Marco plopped his coke can on the back like it was a flag.

Schneider just laughed. He disappeared into the kitchen and came out with a beer, then joined us by sitting in his armchair. "Hey, you're in Captain Hash's company. Did you hear about this crazy new project?"

I struggled to keep my expression from getting too serious. "Crazy new what?"

Schneider blinked at me. "Man, I thought you'd be all over this one. It's like a mentor program or something to this Boys and Girls Club wannabe they got going over in your hometown."

I had heard something along those lines; I just hadn't paid any attention to it. The Sharing sounded like a good idea, but I was too focused on getting into flight school to seriously consider volunteering. "Why is that crazy?"

"'Cause your command is all trying to push it in everyone's face, you know? I swear, they're going to make it mandatory soon. Bad enough I already got to give up half my Saturdays now for these extra duties I'm on."

Marco and I exchanged uneasy looks. If _my_ command was pushing for this new program, then it couldn't be anything good. It wasn't unusual for an officer to get a Good Idea Fairy and become convinced that his half-baked scheme would change the world, and I'd been 'voluntold' to participate in a great many such exercises, so it wouldn't raise any eyebrows. But if Hash was really pushing for this, then I had to assume it was something connected to the Yeerks. It wouldn't make sense for him to waste his time on it otherwise.

At least Schneider didn't seem on board. I had to hope that meant he was still himself.

We chatted idly for a while about unimportant things, and I would have been happy to stay there all day, but we had to get back to tailing people by that afternoon.

Since our goal was to find someone going to feed, we decided to switch our focus to 1SG Polk. We would have to follow one person consistently to make sure we didn't miss the departure and Hash's family had too many parts to it. Polk lived on base with just his wife, as their children had already grown up and moved out.

We drove to his house just to have the truck nearby, even though it was fairly close. A quick check confirmed that both Polks' cars were in the drive. Across the street was a small park, and Marco and I brought a Frisbee to toss so we wouldn't look out of place.

That got dull after a few hours, and we lounged on the grass, discussing plans for how to keep an eye on the house at night.

Just as we were beginning to think about sending one person out for food, Polk emerged from his house and ambled over to his car. Marco and I pretended not to notice, then scrambled to get to the truck as soon as he was out of sight. We caught up to him fairly quickly as he headed out the front gate and followed him from as great a distance as I could manage. I didn't want to risk spooking him.

Polk took an exit near the edge of town and pulled into a strip mall parking lot. We pulled into an In-N-Out drive-thru line in the same parking lot and kept an eye on him while ordering dinner. Polk got out of his car but merely leaned against the trunk, as if waiting for someone.

Marco noticed it before I did. "Dude, look. Shop for sale. Right next to a grocery store."

Sure enough, a Ralph's made up most of the strip mall, and a few doors down from it sat an empty store front with the windows covered with paper. A 'SOLD' sticker had been stuck over the signs advertising the space for rent. Could this be the same shop that Hash and his daughter had been discussing earlier?

We parked and ate in the truck. A few minutes later another car arrived and the driver got out to shake hands with Polk. Even though our objective was just to tail the man and find out where he went, I couldn't help but want to know what those two were talking about.

Fortunately, Marco was of the same mind. As soon as they disappeared into the store, we got out and followed them. The front door was slightly ajar as we approached, and I could tell why. The air coming out of the shop was musty and hot. Clearly the air conditioning hadn't been started up yet.

"...how you got it closed so quickly," Polk was saying. "Approval just came down this morning."

"We figured it would just be neater to take the realtor. Cut down on the hassle. Paperwork's still going through, but we can begin construction as soon as we're ready." The second man's voice had a nasally, youthful quality, even though he'd appeared to be in his mid-40s.

"As soon as we get the tunnels finished, we can step up our recruitment efforts. Won't have to wait for the entire front to be set up." Polk sneezed several times in rapid succession, no doubt due to the dust. "Get someone in to clean this place today, though. It's filthy."

Nasal wandered past the sliver of open door we could see through, writing something on a notepad. "Right away, sub-visser. The tunnel from the Pool is already under construction. We were just waiting on a final location to complete the last leg. Should only take a few more days."

"Good. I'm sick of making that drive every time I have to eat."

Marco and I traded confused looks. A tunnel to a Pool? But Ax had said that they went up to their ship to feed. Why would they need a tunnel?

Polk and Nasal wandered further into the store discussing contractors and layouts. It quickly became clear that they were going to turn the space into a branch office for The Sharing, which only cemented my assumption that the organization was connected to the Yeerks. After they moved out of our hearing, Marco and I stepped back from the door.

"You heard all that?" Marco asked, disbelief clear in his voice.

"Yeah."

"I think Little Boy Blue got a few things wrong."

I just nodded absently. I was too stuck on Polk's mention of 'recruiting' to catch on to what Marco was saying.

He elbowed me hard in the side to get my attention. "Jake. That alien nut-job wants to get off the planet harder than anything. What if he knew about this and just let us think otherwise?"

"Oh, come on, Marco. He wouldn't-" I had no idea what Ax would or wouldn't do. I wanted to believe him, wanted to trust that he wouldn't outright lie to us. The way he communicated made me feel like I could almost read his mind and lured me into taking everything he said as true. But I had no way of knowing that for sure. "It...it could have just been a mistake. Let's not start creating new enemies. These guys are bad enough."

We heard footsteps coming toward the door and darted into the shop next door to avoid being spotted. Through the window, we saw Polk and Nasal shake hands one more time and part ways. As we hurried to get to my truck again, I thought to myself that there had to be a better way to tail someone. I could have at least kept the rental car.

Polk got back on the highway and it quickly became apparent that he was headed to my hometown. Comments about 'making the long drive to eat' floated through my head as we followed and I couldn't help but wonder if we'd hit a stroke of luck so early in the mission.

Staying out of sight on the highway wasn't easy. We had to keep far enough back from Polk that he wouldn't recognize me, and there were very few cars out on that particular stretch of road. We almost missed it when he took an exit in a residential section of town, but Marco caught sight of him pulling into a diner parking lot just off the highway. I turned around at the next exit and headed to the diner.

Mel's was an old staple in our town. It was the epitome of a greasy spoon, with cracked vinyl seats and kitschy décor, but they had the best grill in town. Still, something told me Polk hadn't driven an hour out just to try the hash.

We parked on the opposite side of the lot from Polk and headed inside. I was nervous about being spotted, but I needed have worried. Polk wasn't anywhere to be seen. We took a seat in a corner booth and hunkered down behind our menus in case he reappeared.

"He's got to be in here somewhere," Marco said, his eyes darting out to the parking lot. There weren't any other shops around for him to have ducked into.

"Maybe he's in the bathroom?"

"Yeah, he drove fifty miles out of his way to use the john. Come on, man, you know there's something hikky going on here."

"Fine. So there is. But this is Mel's. What could they possibly do in a diner?"

"Install new security cameras for one." Marco nodded over my shoulder, and I turned around to ask the guy behind me for his salt as a cover for checking. Sure enough, there were new cameras installed over the door that led to the bathrooms and the kitchen. They were the kind covered by a tinted dome so you couldn't tell where the camera was pointed.

"Something tells me that ain't there just to discourage hooligans."

"Hooligans?"

Marco shrugged. "Blame the diner. It brings out the '50s in me."

"Fine. So how are we going to get past the cameras, Gramps?"

"You're the expert. How would you get past it?"

"Marco, I'm in the Army. If the Army wants to go somewhere, we just go and flip the camera the bird on the way past. 'Fraid I'm not an expert at sneaking except in the woods."

Marco thought for a moment and chewed on his lower lip, his gaze occasionally darting back over to the door. "Well, might as well do it your way. It's not like we're not allowed to be in here, after all."

I shook my head. "I'd rather not be caught on camera following my boss around. I don't think I'd enjoy the way these guys ask questions."

Marco rolled his eyes. "Fine. Got to do everything the hard way, don't you?" He stood up to leave and waved me back into my seat when I started to follow. "Hey, get me a cherry pie. And be ready to head back there when you get the signal."

"What signal?"

"The one I'm going to send that says 'Hey, dumbass, this is the perfect opportunity.'"

I tried to make a smart remark, but Marco was already on his way out before I could think of one. Instead, I just slouched in my seat and grumbled to myself. The waitress came around and I ordered two slices of pie and some coffee. The wait became interminable as I kept an eye on the entire diner, wondering if every little thing was supposed to be my 'signal.'

I stopped wondering when every light in the place went out. Even the lights in the parking lot went dark. Several people cried out, startled, and someone in the kitchen dropped a dish. The sun had just set outside and there was just enough ambient light to see the general outlines of things, but not enough to make out any details. I darted out of the booth and made a bee-line for the bathroom door, swerving around confused patrons.

The door led to a short hallway with four doors leading off it: the men's room, the women's room, the kitchen, and what I supposed was a supply closet. Five people came out of the closet door and I jumped into the bathroom to avoid being seen. I held open the bathroom door just a sliver, but I couldn't make out any details of the people filing past.

Once they were gone, I checked to see the hall was clear and went into the closet. Just as I'd suspected, I found nothing but shelves of odd items that I couldn't make out in the dark. But five people had come out. There was hardly enough room in the closet for myself, let alone four others. I fumbled around, looking for a secret switch or button or anything that would tell me where those extra people had come from. Before I could find it, the back wall of the closet swung open like it was on a hinge and I was faced with a huffing, wheezing, portly man with grey hair.

"What's going on out there?" he demanded.

I snapped to attention out of habit. It seemed safest, since I didn't know what rank this man was and he didn't seem inclined to shoot me on sight. "Power went out. We're not sure why. Already sent some people to check it out."

"Good. And what are you doing here?"

"Um...couldn't find the way in in the dark."

The man laughed at that and waved for me to go in past him. We traded places and the man left through the closet door.

The secret door led to a wide staircase of shallow, narrow stairs, lit by dim emergency lights on the ceiling. I could see why the man had been out of breath, if he'd taken these in a hurry. They descended down for a couple hundred meters and then turned out of sight. Without much of a choice, I headed down the stairs.

After the turn, the stairs got steeper, and a faint purple glow illuminated the bottom. Judging from the decent, whatever was down there was at least several stories underground. I could guess well enough that it would be 'the Pool,' but I still had no idea what to expect. Elfangor and Ax's descriptions were always of a dull sludge, but surely that couldn't be it.

At the bottom, the stairs turned again and came out in a wide cavern after a few more steps. I stopped before the final turn and peaked around the corner, then remained unmoving out of pure shock.

The cavern was enormous. The size of four or five football fields, at least. The actual Pool took up very little space, comparatively. It couldn't have been more than a sixth of the overall size of the place and sat against the far wall, two short piers jutting out over the sludge. A square device attached to the roof of the cavern cast everything in a dull red glow, except where electric lights had been installed and the angry red cast pink or purple shadows.

But that wasn't the most shocking part. The entire cavern was filled with activity. One corner had construction equipment busy at work building some sort of prefab building. Humans and Hork-Bajir and some other race that looked like giant centipedes hurried this way and that. One entire wall had a row of offices and another appeared to be an open-sided warehouse, filled with enough boxes and crates and mysterious packages to carry an army through a siege. Tunnels led off in every direction, wide enough to pass a train through. Some of them _did _have trains. Compact little cars that looked like bullets and didn't run on any tracks I could see, but which disgorged their passengers and then sped off again faster than I could blink.

It wasn't just a feeding ground. It was an entire command post. Everything they needed to run their invasion, even if they got cut off from outside help, could be found right here in this underground nightmare.

I was so distracted by the enormity of what I was seeing that I missed the cages at first. A scream drew my attention. Next to the pool, enormous cages two levels high had been erected. Only the bottom level had anyone in it, a small group of humans huddled into one corner. As I watched, two Hork-Bajir dragged a woman kicking and screaming out of the cage while the other humans stayed well clear of their blades. I gripped the corner of my wall hard enough to turn my knuckles white, but there was nothing I could do to stop what was happening and I knew it would be suicide to try.

The Hork-Bajir dragged her over to the shorter of the two piers and the woman stopped struggling. She just collapsed between her captors and sobbed. It was the soft, tired crying of someone who couldn't control it and didn't care to try. The sound was quieted when they shoved her head under the sludge.

A few seconds later, the woman stood up on her own, made a face as she wiped sludge out of her hair, and calmly walked off as the Hork-Bajir went back to the cage for their next victim. One of the others stood up as they entered the cage, defiance clear in her stance, and I turned away. I wouldn't be able to watch what happened next without doing something, and doing something down here would spell disaster. The odds were a thousand to one.

I ran up the stairs, and the sound of screaming followed me.


	12. Chapter 12

When I made it back up to Mel's, the power was still off and the dining area had all but cleared out. Only a few customers remained, including Marco sitting in our booth. I slipped into my seat across from him.

"So? Did you find anything?"

I shot him a glare. How could he just sit there munching on pie and looking so smug when right under our feet people were being tortured? I wanted to punch the smirk right off him and had to remind myself that he hadn't seen what I just saw. He didn't know. But the thought of remaining safe up here while those people stayed in the cages made me physically ill.

I was mad at myself for running.

"So...was that a yes or a no?" Marco asked again.

"Let's get out of here." I pulled out some money and left it next to my uneaten pie.

"Now? But our guy hasn't come back yet."

"Doesn't matter. We got what we need."

I headed for the door without waiting for an answer and Marco caught up to me out in the parking lot. We drove in silence and after a few minutes Marco sat up and realized that we weren't heading back to base. He started to say something, but I glared at him again and he changed his mind. I didn't have much of a plan. Hell, I didn't even have a good _reason_ for the little bit I did have planned. I just knew that I had to do something about what I'd seen down there, and there was only one person who could tell me what I wanted to know.

Tobias lived in a ramshackle, ancient apartment building with only four units. His was a studio on the backside of the building, and his Pinto blocked the driveway. I parked on the street and took the outdoor stairs two at a time with Marco hot on my heels. I knocked on the door with my fist and then tested the handle without waiting for an answer. Unlocked. I kicked it open.

The apartment was a single room, a bed in one corner and a half-kitchen in another. Every available wall space was covered in art, some of it in various stages of completion. Dirty clothes and leftover food wrappers and art detritus littered the floor. But the only thing I focused on was the giant blue alien sitting in the middle of the room.

"You lied to us!" I bellowed, unable to stop myself now that he was right in front of me.

Marco grabbed me from behind to keep me from advancing on Ax, but I shoved him off. Tobias jumped off the bed where he'd been reading a book, but not fast enough. Ax scrambled to his feet and put his tail blade out between us, and for once I was unconcerned about what he might be able to do with it.

"You lied. They're not using any god damn ships; they're digging in here!"

{I don't know-}

"They're _here_. Their Pool is _here_. It's under the city. They've got...got..." They've got people in cages. Enough equipment to survive an apocalypse. A good enough base that even if we did tell the world what was going on, it wouldn't make a difference.

People in cages.

I was so furious that I couldn't speak, just stood there shaking slightly while the others tried to process what I'd said.

{That's not possible,} Ax insisted, though he sounded unsure. {They wouldn't...they've never...}

"Well they would and they have."

His clear confusion took a lot of the wind out of my sails. I couldn't rightly be angry at him for making an honest mistake. I could and still was angry about everything else. About our willingness to take his word for gospel, about the realization that it could have easily spelled disaster.

I spun away from him and nearly ran into Marco. He didn't get out of my way, but rather stood with his arms crossed and a disapproving glare on his face. "Well? Are you going to tell us anything or would you rather just stand there and yell some more?"

I started to barrel past him, but he wouldn't let me. We were far past the days where my size would let me get away with stuff like that; he had the muscle to put me in place when the occasion called for it. When he bodily blocked my way to the door, my attempts to shove him out of the way didn't budge him. Likely I could have gotten out if I wanted, but I wasn't angry enough to actually strike my best friend.

In fact, I wasn't angry at all. As quickly as it had come, my ire left me, and all I had was the sense of helplessness and disgust that my fury had been masking. I clenched my fists at my side and couldn't look at anyone else in the room.

"You're saying they've got a Pool under Mel's?" Marco prompted.

"No," I snapped. "Not under Mel's. Under the whole fucking city." I heaved out a sigh and ran my hands through my hair. "It's enormous. It's not just a...a pool, it's everything." I didn't really know how to describe what I'd seen. The enormity of what it _meant_. That it was just more than a bunch of buildings and stuff and tunnels. "It's an army," I settled on at last.

"We already knew they had an army," Marco said.

"No, you don't get it; it's an army _here_. It's a _base_. It's not these guys taking people up into space every few days and trying to run around some crap Achilles heel. The fuckers are organized! They're dug in! They're here for the long haul and they've made a several-thousand-person-sized bunker _under our city_."

That got Marco to sober up at last. I couldn't bear to look at Ax and gauge his reaction, but Tobias rummaged around on the floor and came up with a large sketchbook and some pencils. "What was in it?"

I tried to describe the scene, but Tobias interrupted at various points to ask more specific questions, getting me to explain a structure or think harder about some missing details. As I talked, he sketched a few quick scenes of the Pool and tore out the pages to hand to the others. I was stunned out how well he'd captured it; his sparse lines did more to convey a sense of militaristic purpose than my words ever could have.

We both faltered over the description of the cages. I used as few words as possible and he did the same.

In just a few minutes, we had a working rough draft of the Pool complex before us, and I understood why Tobias had insisted on drawing it. Seeing it so stark like that made it real. Real things were not boogiemen.

Real things were targets.

"Okay," he said as he laid down the last sketch. "Now we know what we're dealing with. What do we do about it?"

"We destroy it."

{That is quite impossible.}

The finality in Ax's tone snapped me out of dark thoughts and half-formed plans. I glanced up at him with my eyes narrowed, in no mood at all to deal with this alien's proclamations from on high. "_I_ am going to do something about this. If it takes me the rest of my life and I die trying, I am going to see this hell-hole destroyed. You can come along or you can stay out of my way."

The very house seemed to hold its breath after my proclamation. Ax hesitated, his tail held high over his head in a way that reminded me of a cat with its fur raised. {You don't have the training or the ability-}

"I have more training than you've ever bothered to ask about, and what I don't have, I'll learn." There was no way I'd let this blue stranger tell me what was possible or impossible again. _Especially_ not when he tried to advise me against doing something to hurt the Yeerks.

They were in _my_ town. They weren't just poking around it, planning to invade. They _had_ invaded. They had everyone, my family and my friends, walking around on a razor's edge, blithely going around in danger that they knew nothing of. I felt violated. My childhood home, something that should have been forever safe and comforting. I grew up here. I should be able to come back here and feel loved. I'd been in battle. I'd been in situations that still gave me nightmares. At times, the only thing that kept me going was knowing that I could return to my mother's kitchen and be her son again, because nothing, nothing in the world, could tarnish that.

They'd tarnished my town. I wanted to kill them all. Nothing was going to stop me.

Ax dropped his tail slightly. {The odds against any successful attack-}

"Are enormous, but not insurmountable. I'm not proposing that we charge in Rambo-style and light the place on fire. We make a plan. We'll be smart about it. But I'll be _damned_ before I sit back and let those parasites continue taking people in peace."

"Me, too," Tobias said, with more conviction than I would have thought possible from the smaller man.

I looked over at Marco, who continued staring at the pictures. He finally raised his head and met my eye, his expression more serious than any I'd ever seen. "Don't you dare ask me to join you unless you've got one hell of a plan. I'm not going to die for anything less than a damn good reason, not even for you."

That put a damper on my fervor, but just a little bit. Marco hadn't said he wouldn't go with me. He'd as good as said that he would. But he was still right. We couldn't tackle something like this lightly. There was no point in getting martyred.

"Maybe we should call the girls before we start talking about all the good reasons for dying," Tobias suggested.

I nodded and Tobias called Rachel. She and Cassie were at the mall and promised to be over in a few minutes.

While we waited, Tobias revised his sketches as best he could. My information was sketchy; I'd only had a brief view of the complex. Most of the rough map was left blank, and the locations of the tunnels were only approximate.

By the time the girls arrived, we had the sketches laid out on the floor and were gathered around them. Ax busied himself with his bags in a corner and did his best to ignore us.

Rachel came in first, loaded down with shopping bags. "Alright, I think I've got everything to make our friend look- What are you guys doing?" She came to look over my shoulder and frowned at what she saw. "What is all this?"

"This," I said, standing up, "is what the Yeerks are actually doing instead of ferrying people into space. They've made a base in a giant cave under our city."

Rachel's head snapped up and she turned her glare on Ax, but Cassie cut in before any more insults could be hurled. "My god. Are these accurate? How did you find out about this?"

We shifted around the sketches to make room for the girls to sit and I related the story of our trip to Mel's. I finished it by once again declaring that I would find a way to shut this place down.

"Well of course we are," Rachel said at once, turning my singular pronoun into a plural. "The only question is how."

Cassie ran her fingers over the part of the sketch that showed the cages. Tobias had drawn a few vague figures in it, then abandoned doing any more, but that just made the cages look like a home to ghosts. "Even if we can't do something right away, we have to at least help these people. We can't just leave them like that. Surely there has to be a way we can get them out."

"We'll find a way," I assured her. I didn't particularly like the idea of a multi-part attack, but I couldn't help but agree with her. If we attacked more than one time, each time would get harder, but just the thought of leaving those people one second longer than we needed to made me sick. "We need to learn more about the place, though. I only got one look, and it wasn't a very good one."

"Okay, so we go back in," Rachel said. In her certain, confident tones, it sounded so easy. "We look around, find what we need. Can't be that dangerous if you got in and out alright."

I ignored her jab. "There didn't seem to be any system for checking people off, but we don't want to just assume then entrances aren't watched. Last thing we need is to figure out they've got better security only after they catch us."

{And they will catch you.} Ax, still standing, hovered outside our circle of conspirators but didn't make any effort to join us. {You have no idea what you're up against.}

"We heard you the first time," Marco snapped. "The Doom and Gloom Show isn't really helping. Be useful or shut up."

{To even attempt it would be suicide! Do you not understand what you are up against? These are not the feeble human enemies you are used to.}

I jumped to my feet at that. I'd seen too much damage caused by 'feeble' human enemies to let the comment pass. "What do you-"

{They will go after your families.} His comment cut me off cold. {If you are seen looking around in places you should not, they will know it. They do not rely on recognition or on sight to protect their ships - nor anything else, I assume. They will know you if you try and enter again, and if they cannot catch you then, they will catch everyone you care about in order to get to you.} After a pause, he added, {And if they catch you first, they will enslave the rest anyway, just to be safe.}

Something about the tone of his thoughts told me that he didn't know this from anything but his own gut, but for once I trusted that. He had a better understanding of the lengths the Yeerks would go to, of their attitudes. And worse than that, what he said made sense.

I looked around the circle. The other's faces had all gone pale, all except Tobias. He just looked ashamed. The one person in this apartment who didn't have a loved one to lose.

"We'll find another way in," Cassie said softly. "Whatever they have, it can't be perfect. And if we have to, we'll hide our families first." She met my eyes briefly and then looked down. "I will, at least."

I stepped around Marco and crouched next to her, put my hand on her shoulder, and for once she didn't shy away.

{You'll all die,} Ax repeated, confused.

"No one lives forever," Tobias told him. "We should do some good before we go."

For a long moment, everyone was silent. I almost expected to hear an objection, to hear someone back out, but everyone seemed to be supporting Tobias's statement with their silence.

Ax shifted his weight between his front hooves and his back ones, clearly agitated. His stalk eyes darted around the room, but his main ones fixed on me, and I didn't flinch from his gaze. Finally, he snapped his tail over his head, making us all start at the sound, and turned to root through one of the bags he'd saved from the burn ship.

{Well, if you are all determined to throw your lives away, then I suppose it will do no damage to give you this.} He stepped forward into our circle and held out the small blue box.


	13. Chapter 13

"So let me get this straight. We touch that thing there, and then we'll be able to go all Animal Planet like you can?" Marco looked beyond skeptical, an attitude I shared even if I didn't voice it.

{I don't know what you mean by 'go Animal Planet.'}

"What's the matter, Marco? Are you afraid to try it?" Rachel asked. Unlike the rest of us, she looked positively eager.

"Well why shouldn't I be? Someone whips out a little blue box and says it'll give me superpowers? There's got to be a catch."

{There are many dangers associated with the Escafil Device, but the benefits far outweigh them.}

Rachel held out her hand for the box. "Let's do it, then."

Ax took her hand and placed it on the side of the box, then looked around to the rest of us. Not to be outdone, I stepped forward and touched it as well. I didn't know if it would really do what Ax said it would, but I was willing to find out. Tobias and Cassie were just a second behind me.

"Now what do we do?" I asked Ax.

{You do nothing. I will activate it, and afterward you will have the ability.} He focused all four eyes on the box and it started to glow faintly.

Quite suddenly, Marco's hand reached over my shoulder and rested on the top of the box. I looked back at him and he gave me a glare that dared me to say anything.

A second later it was over, and Ax took the box away. {There. It is done.} His words sounded heavy, full of regret and uncertainty. And a touch of guilt. He'd done something against his better judgment by giving us this power. His judgment, but not his instincts.

I looked down at my hand, but the box had left no marks. "Are you sure it took? I don't feel any different."

{Of course you do not. You are not using the ability right now.}

"How do we use it?" Tobias asked, also staring at his hand. "Shouldn't we...you know, test it to make sure?"

{You will have to touch the creature you wish to acquire before you can copy it.}

Tobias jumped to his feet and went to the other side of the bed. He picked up an ancient tabby cat that I hadn't seen previously and brought it over to our circle. The cat meowed indignantly, but as soon as Tobias set him down, he stretched and wandered over to Cassie to be petted. "Can we use Dude?"

{If you wish. The process is quite simple. Just maintain contact with the animal and concentrate on it.}

Tobias sat next to Cassie and pulled Dude into his lap, a process which the cat suffered with only a little bit of complaint. After Tobias had him for a few minutes, though, he went very still and appeared to fall asleep. Tobias's eyes went wide, and he pulled his hands off the cat and stared at them as if he'd never seen them before. "Whoa."

Marco raised his hand like he was in school. "Question. How does turning into a cat help us again?"

{Well, likely this animal will not help. But if we can find one of the hosts, we can assume their form and enter undetected.}

"Turn into someone else?" Cassie asked. "Like identity theft?"

"Well why not?" Rachel countered. "Then if we get identified while going in, at least we'll have a good excuse for being there."

{If there are other animals native to the area around the entrance, we may be able to suffice with one of those instead.}

"There's nothing around Mel's," I said. "Maybe a few bugs."

Rachel scoffed. "Does this even work on something that sma-"

"AAAAH!"

I scrambled into a defensive crouch, ready to spring, but when I saw what had made Tobias shout I froze instead. He was covered in patches of fur, thicker on his arms than anywhere else, and his face was a nightmare mix of cat and human. His lips had shrunk and changed, revealing sharp teeth, but the shape of his jaw hadn't changed. His nose had started to flatten, his eyes to shrink, and his fingers to retract and form paws. He tried to touch his altered face with his altered hands, as if that would help him somehow comprehend what had happened to him.

Ax was by his side in a second, and he pulled Tobais's hands away and held them at his sides. {Focus on your own body,} he said, his thoughts projecting an image of Tobias as a human. And not just an image, but an entire impression of him. Of the faint smell of paint and a feeling of quiet intensity. {You can change back, just focus on yourself. Don't panic.}

Slowly at first, then faster, the fur on Tobias's body disappeared and his face and hands returned to normal. When he was completely human again, Ax let go of his hands. "What...what just happened?" he asked in a shaky voice.

{You began the morph process by accident. It is a common occurrence with those who have just received the ability. The important thing to remember is that you must keep calm when changing.}

"What happens if you don't?"

{The people around you get really annoyed.}

The whole room was silent, and I couldn't tell if I was more shocked by Tobias's mishap, or the fact that Ax had just made a joke. Apparently, Marco decided to focus on the joke, because he started to laugh. "Oh, well, we wouldn't want to annoy everyone with our screaming, would we?"

{It gets irritating very fast, since there are very few things that can actually go wrong while morphing. If you get 'stuck' in the middle, it is just a matter of calming down and then either continuing or reversing the process.} His words carried his superior attitude and the knowledge that _he_ had never gotten stuck, and distain for people who knew the truth and lost control anyway. Ax turned to Tobias. {If you focus on the animal you wish to morph, it will begin the process again. Just keep your focus all the way through it and you'll be fine.}

Tobias nodded, visibly shaken, and for a moment nothing happened. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. We watched in fascination as he started to change again. This time, the fur didn't come first. First his ears traveled up the side of his head. His nose pushed out and flattened at the same time. His arms lengthened and then shrank, changing shape as they did. And after a significant amount of change had already taken place, he began to shrink down to cat-sized. He was about twice the size of a cat before he finally started to sprout fur.

His clothes did not morph with him, and when Tobias finished the change into feline, he did so while covered by his shirt. Once the shirt stopped moving, we all waited with baited breath to see what would happen next. Tobias clawed his way out of the pile of fabric and sat next to it, fastidiously grooming his fur and ignoring all of us.

Cassie, who was closest, glanced around at the rest of us, before she reached out toward him. "Um, Tobias?"

His only response was to look up, then rub his cheek against her outstretched hand. The real Dude continued to nap in a patch of sunlight outside our circle, and neither cat seemed to notice the other.

"What's he doing?" I asked Ax.

Ax looked between me and cat!Tobias a few times. {I assume he is acting like a cat.} He motioned for Cassie to stop petting him, which she did. {Tobias. You're making your friends worried.}

Tobias started, stood up on all fours, and spun around in a circle. {That was weird.}

"Hey, we can hear him the same way as you," Marco exclaimed, giving Ax an accusatory look.

{You can?} Tobias sat down facing Marco, his gaze oddly intense, even for a cat. {You can hear me?}

Marco flinched. "Yeah, I can. Stop shouting."

I hadn't noticed a change in volume in Tobias's thoughts, but Marco obviously did.

Ax chuckled. Or rather, 'chuckle' is the only word to describe what he did. Though no real sound came through, a clear feeling of amusement did, a kind of...mental tickle. {You do not need to concentrate so hard. Merely direct your thoughts outward to communicate.}

Tobias scrunched up his nose, but didn't say anything. He cocked his head to the side, and I got the impression he'd just tried to say something and failed. "Yeah, we didn't hear that."

{Fuck.}

"Heard that."

This time Rachel chuckled. "Clearly we'll need to practice before we try this for real."

Her comment made me think of something. I turned to Ax and asked, "Will we all be able to do that when we morph? Even if we morph into another human?" After all, Ax could still thought-speak while human. If we could do the same, and if we could do it the way Elfangor did it when he spoke only to us...well, it certainly would be a handy skill to have while surrounded by an enemy.

{I don't see why not. That aspect was worked into the process to ensure that we could still communicate in our natural way even when morphed. It is not connected to the nature of the morphs.}

Once again his words sounded hollow and clinical. Parroted from some textbook, likely. But it told me what I needed to know. We could use this. We could morph into other hosts, we could get in, and we could talk to each other privately while there. "Alright then. Let's get started."

Several hours later, we'd all acquired and morphed into Dude successfully, and we'd also learned how to control thought-speak. It wasn't a difficult skill, but it was impossible to explain, so we learned by trial and error. Even Ax couldn't help in that regard, as whenever we asked him for specifics on how he communicated, he always answered that he 'just did.' To him it was just a natural act.

The act of acquiring and morphing didn't hurt, but it was still unlike anything else I'd felt before. I _felt_ the cat's DNA enter my body, like I was pulling something intangible into myself. I _felt_ each change in my body, heard my bones grind and shift, felt my skin stretch and tingle as it grew fur. Although each stage left the impression that it _should_ hurt, none of it actually did.

By the end, we had six identical cats and one andalite lounging around in Tobias's apartment. Something about stretching out on the floor as a cat was indescribably better than doing the same as a human. The cat that was now part of me didn't want to get up and didn't care about anything in the world. Perhaps it was the lack of a crushing sense of responsibility that kept me in that patch of sunshine long after we'd figured out the speaking angle.

A stray thought from Marco drifted into my mind. I knew it was from Marco, and I knew that only I received it, like a sixth sense than came with thought-speak. But instead of using words like we had been doing, Marco managed to just get across an impression of the six of us lounging about and his amusement at the mental image. We were as lazy as the most stereotypical cat out there.

{It would probably be wise for you to demorph now,} Ax told us after we'd all been quiet for a while.

{Why?} I asked, relaxed and distracted enough to seriously consider taking a nap.

{It's not advisable to stay in a morph for too long.}

{We going to get stuck or something?}

{That is one of the risks.}

That got me to wake up. It worked on the others as well; everyone was on their feet. Everyone except the real Dude. {When were you planning on telling us this?} I demanded.

{Right now.}

I started to demorph immediately, concentrating on my human body. Doing so was difficult while anger at Ax distracted me, but I managed it without any mishaps. Once I had a mouth again, I started in on him, though. "You need to tell us this sort of thing _before_ we start, not just whenever you feel like it. Good God, we seriously could have gotten stuck as cats? And you thought that wasn't an important detail?" As I finished changing back to human, I noticed I was naked and grabbed my pants to put in my lap.

{You were well within the recommended time limit. There was no danger.}

"You don't know that things would have stayed that way! You can't withhold information from us if we're going to work together. We have a right to know the dangers of what we're getting into before we begin."

Marco and Tobias demorphed while I talked, but I noticed the other two cats slink off to the bathroom. No doubt the girls wanted to change back in private.

Ax, for his part, looked stunned by my tirade. {I did not intend to-}

"What you intended doesn't amount to shit if you don't think first." I was in a full-tilt sergeant mode and in no mood to put up with his shit. I couldn't really help my reaction; I wasn't as angry as I sounded, but I _was_ mad, and more than that I was determined to make sure that Ax understood why. It didn't even occur to me that I was treating him like an errant private. "You treat us like children, dolling out little bits of information when _you_ feel they are necessary, and that is going to stop _now_. If you are going to be with us, then you are going to treat us like peers, because it's our asses on the line here. You keep acting like this and it's going to get someone killed, and I _will not_ allow that. Do I make myself clear?"

Ax held still, his tail posed high over his head, and for a moment I got the crazy idea that he would challenge me with it. A duel between his tail blade and myself would not end in my favor, but I stared him down anyway. There was no way I'd let his arrogance put my friends in danger, no matter how handy his bag of tricks turned out to be.

Eventually, his tail lowered a fraction, and his main eyes darted down to the floor before meeting my own. {I apologize. I was not as respectful as I could have been. It won't happen again.}

I'd been fully prepared to fight over this, so his answer took me off guard, but I didn't let that show. Instead I just nodded and accepted his apology.

From the bathroom, Rachel called, "If you boys are done fighting for dominance, could you hand us our clothes?"

Tobias tossed their clothes in the bathroom and we all got dressed. I wondered if we'd be able to find a way around the nudity issue or if we'd have to just learn to deal with it.

"Hey!" Marco cried out. "My ink is gone!"

Curious, I turned around to see what he was talking about. He held out his left arm, the inside facing up, showing off the unblemished skin there. He'd gotten his first tattoo the past summer, a stylized sun design, only now it was missing.

In a bit of a panic, I checked my right arm. Clear. I checked my left leg. Also clear. My own tattoos were missing, as cleanly as if I'd never gotten them. My scar was missing from my leg as well. I reached up and touched my left ear. Whole and perfect. "What the hell is going on?"

We looked at Ax for an explanation, and he twitched his tail from side to side. {The morphing works based off of DNA. Any disfiguring marks would have been repaired by the process, since injuries aren't coded in our genetic material.}

"Inju- They weren't injuries, they were tattoos!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. They were gone. But I looked at Ax's fur-covered body and realized that someone with his physiology would probably never even consider getting a tattoo, much less realize why someone would want one intentionally.

Marco, I knew, would only be mildly put out by his loss, but I was in another state entirely. My tats had been extremely important to me. The one on my arm, a replica of a fallen soldier's memorial, had been in honor of the servicemen I'd deployed with who'd died. I had their dogtags included in the design. I'd gone back to the artist three times to have tags added, until there were five total. I carried that tat around as a reminder of my friends, and even though I knew it was just symbolic, it always made me feel like I had a piece of them with me.

And now they were gone.

The one on my leg had been a design incorporating the insignia of all three units I'd served in so far, with room for more. A statement of pride for the _surviving_ men I'd served with. Now also gone. Even my scars were part of me. The one that had nearly taken out my leg tattoo had been from a piece of shrapnel, from the same explosion that had killed Evans. Erased. Erased as if it had never happened, as if I'd never been through that day and lost that friend and experienced that fight. The jagged chunk of my ear that had been shot off by a stray bullet when I stupidly took off my Kevlar one day. Restored as if I'd never learned that lesson or survived that ambush.

"Oh, relax. I never understood why you wanted to ink yourself up in the first place." Rachel came out of the bathroom, running her hands through her hair to make it lay straight even though it was already perfect.

"Relax? Relax? Do you know how look it took me to get those? And what are people going to say when I start walking around without them?"

"Wear long shirts?"

"I work in a uniform. I don't really have a choice." Even though my emotions were stuck on the utter shock of having my body altered, the logical part of my brain knew that my bigger problem was the one I'd mentioned to Rachel. People were going to notice this. Especially the ear, which couldn't be hidden with clothing.

{Why is this a substantial problem?} Ax asked, clearly bewildered. {You were disfigured, and now your scars have been repaired.}

"I _liked_ my scars," I insisted. "And I'm not going to be able to explain why they're gone. I can't exactly tell people that a giant blue alien had me turn into a cat and my DNA didn't like tattoos."

"Jake." Cassie came out of the bathroom and laid her hand on my arm to break my attention. "Calm down. We'll figure this out. It's not an insurmountable problem."

I took a deep breath and willed myself to stop freaking out. Cassie was right. It wasn't impossible. I'd just have to come up with a good excuse. It was spring. I could get my dad to write a note saying I had a skin allergy to one of the million things floating around in the air right now. That would allow me to wear long sleeves and pants at PT. It wouldn't work forever, but it was a start. And as upset as I was, we had larger things to worry about.

Everyone watched me, waiting, so I pulled myself up straighter and turned to Ax. "I think you should fill us in on this morphing ability now."

Ax shifted again between his front and back legs, a subtle sort of rocking, but an action I'd come to realize signaled discomfort. {The Escafil Device imparts the ability to change from one's base form to any other organism that has been acquired. Once an animal has been acquired, it will be accessible for morphing from then on. A person who is morphed is genetically identical to the subject they acquired, so they'll be able to pass any sort of biometric scans or identification. We use this ability for intelligence gathering, and it is only given to select personnel who might need it for planet-based missions. We had a Device on the ship just in case we had to recruit others for such missions.}

"So we use this, we morph into people with Yeerks, and there's no way they'll be able to tell the difference?" Marco asked.

{Well, unless something you do gives away the truth. The morphing ability only copies genetics. A subject's memories and experience and knowledge remains unique to that subject. You will have to deal with instinctual urges, but those are easy to overcome.}

I thought back on how easy it had been to care about nothing as a cat. Only now did I realize that it hadn't been my human brain relaxing. Apparently, instincts weren't so easy to identify unless you were forewarned. "What about this time limit?" I asked.

{They recommend that you never stay in a morph longer than four hours. After that, any further morphing becomes...difficult.} His tone carried through his meaning. After four hours, we ran the risk of getting stuck. Of not being able to or not wanting to return to human. I felt Ax's fear and confusion about those who had run into such a fate. About whether or not the 'stuckness' was voluntary or mechanical or some measure of both. {We have made great strides in eliminating the time limit. It used to be that after two hours, one would be stuck no matter what. Now...well, in theory the limit is completely gone and it is _possible_ to continue morphing indefinitely, but those who stay in a morph too long still experience significant problems. It is...not recommended.}

I shivered from the shared fear that came through on his words. It wasn't well defined, but I got the feeling that even he didn't know the specifics. Perhaps no one knew _exactly_ why it happened. I didn't need to know the why; I just needed to know the four hours. "Any other risks we should know about?"

{Loss of control to instincts and the time limit are the greatest problems. Also finding the proper subjects to acquire. It's not recommended to go into a mission without having everything you need first, in case there are adverse reactions.}

"Reactions like what?"

{Some people react to certain morphs by getting violently ill until the offending DNA material is expunged.} His tone carried a mental image of an andalite, his body going through sporadic half-morphs. Ax was amused by this rather than afraid of it, however. Apparently no one had ever been seriously injured by this reaction, just annoyed and teased. Though it would only be funny if one were in a safe environment, not stuck behind enemy lines.

"Anything else?"

Ax thought for a moment, then flicked his tail over his shoulder. {No.}

"Alright, then, we should focus on how we're going to use this." I looked around the room at my friends gathered there. "We don't have to all go into the Pool for this to work. But if we can manage it, I think it would be best for all of us to have first-hand experience down there, in case we have to go back. I'm not going to force anyone to go if they don't want to, though."

Marco pointedly avoided my gaze, but he also didn't say anything.

"I can draw maps from memory," Tobais said. "But it would be better if we could get some pictures while we're down there."

"Might look too suspicious. We'll have to make that call when we're there. We'll do it if we can, though."

"How are we planning to get in?" Cassie stared at the floor as she asked her question, her voice soft. I knew that look. She had something on her mind and was working out how to come around to it.

"Did you already forget about that whole 'changing to cats' thing?" Marco asked. Rachel, next to him, smacked him on the shoulder for it.

"No, Marco, I didn't forget. But are we still planning on morphing into other people?"

"It's the best option we've got." I didn't see what the problem was.

"Can we really do that?" Cassie shook her head, cutting off my immediate reply. "I mean, I know that we're _able_ to now, but should we?"

"You're getting hung up on morals when there's brain-snatching aliens in town?" Marco looked ready to go into a snark-filled tirade.

Cassie just held his gaze levelly with her own, unperturbed by his comment. "Yes, I am. If we do this, we're going to _be_ these people. Everything we do while morphed will be attributed to them. If we get caught, it won't be us and our families that suffer, it will be _them_. We're not even talking about Yeerks here, we're talking about innocent humans who were unlucky enough to get caught. They're already going through hell with that, do we have the right to put them in even _more_ danger?"

I hadn't even considered that. Hadn't even thought about the possible repercussions for the people we copied. I couldn't deny that Cassie was right, but at the same time, what she said didn't change the reality of our situation. "Do we have another option?" I asked her. "I'm not saying you're wrong, but really, what else can we do?"

"Can't we use something else to get in?"

"Anything that would go unnoticed would be too small to get a clear view of the pool. This our best option for getting the information that we need."

Cassie still looked uncomfortable, but I could practically see the wheels in her head turning as she tried to come up with an answer. Finally, she sighed and her shoulders drooped. "If we do this, we can't forget that we'll have more than just our own hides to care for. One hint that we're going to get our morphs in trouble-"

"And we'll abort. That's fine." I looked around to the others and they grudgingly agreed as well. "Alright. In that case, here's the plan."

(0)(0)(0)(0)(0)(0)

A/N: Since I know people are going to ask: Yes, even though I changed the rules for morphing, I still have plans for Tobias. Patience, grasshopper.


	14. Chapter 14

I acquired Corporal Cleever on Monday. Our morning PT session served as a good cover for the dizziness that accompanies the process. It didn't hurt that he was near to ill from sprinting anyway. I sent him back onto the track after making sure he didn't suffer any lingering effects, and he cracked a joke about my outfit. No one had objected to my fake doctor's note and long sleeves, but I that didn't mean I could escape ridicule for looking so different.

I had to force a smile on my face to match Cleever's joke. The normalcy of it made me sick, made me want to want to drag Cleever off and find a way to force that slug out of his head. What kind of force could I use, though? What could I do that wouldn't end up just hurting Cleever instead? I had to simply smile and nod and let him go.

That night, we all met behind a shopping center across the street from Mel's. I didn't ask the others how they'd acquired their covers, but they all assured me that they had. Even Ax had a new human morph to use. I made them all repeat the plan, which was brutally simple. Didn't matter. We'd built in a handful of escape plans, and I made each of them recite them until I was sure they'd be saying it in their sleep. If we'd had better information and more time, I would have made them run drills. As it was, I could see them getting tired and irritable.

"Jake, we've got it," Rachel finally snapped at me. "It's not that hard. Can we just go now?"

I caught a mental laugh from Ax and turned to look at him. He was already in morph, and his eyes crinkled in amusement, even though his mouth stayed flat. He was a military man as well; he knew how the most life-saving drills tended to also be the most monotonous.

"Didn't realize you were waiting on me," I told her, gently teasing her. "Why didn't you say so?"

She stuck her tongue out at me and took a seat on the ground to begin her morph. Cassie had practiced this part already and explained that it worked better if we sat. Rapidly changing height and shape can put anyone off balance.

Rachel had chosen an older woman, a lady in her mid-50s with ash-blonde hair and rounded features. Rachel's body seemed to melt into putty before wriggling into a new shape, rather than just transform directly into a new person. When she finished, she looked completely different, but the brusque way she picked herself off the ground and brushed down her pants gave her away as still being Rachel. "Uhg, I should have gone for someone younger," she complained. "My joints already hurt." She twisted her hair up into a bun and then put her hands on her hips. "Well, what are the rest of you waiting for?"

"To see if you get struck down for blasphemy?" Marco offered.

"I honestly don't think God cares if we play sci-fi dress up," she said. "Besides, you're atheist."

"Agnostic," Marco corrected, though it came out muffled since he'd started his own morph.

I didn't want to see what those two would do with a fight about religion, especially not before a mission, so I called Rachel over. "Now-"

"I go in first, I have ten minutes to scope the place out, if I see nothing wrong I sit in a window seat and order coffee. If it's suspicious, I sit at the bar and order pie. If it's 'Holy Fuck Abort,' I get out of dodge and meet you guys as you're coming in. Not that hard a system, Jake."

"But-"

"And I know what to look for that might be suspicious. You've been drilling it into me for an hour. Calm down. We're just going in for recon." She gave me a pat on the arm and headed off before I could say anything more. She looked pretty spry for someone who'd complained about her joints just a few moments before.

I looked back and realized I was the last person to get ready. After taking a few deep breaths, I sat down and started my morph.

The cat morph had been a trip. Everything in my body shifted for that one, turning me into something completely new. For this, though, I retained my basic physiology. My bones, my organs, my brain, my eyes, my fingers and legs and nose. It all remained in the proper place, just a slightly different shape. By the end, I felt as if I'd been taken apart like a Lego character and reassembled wrong. I knew what my body should have felt like, but it wasn't in quite the same place. My arms were too short. My legs were too long. The cat had been different enough to accept everything new, but Cleever was just alike enough to trick me into thinking I should have stayed the same.

The others, except for Ax, looked like they felt the same. Marco had morphed a man almost a foot taller than himself; he kept ducking away from the awning above us, or looking at his hands as if they puzzled him.

"What are you doing?" I finally asked after the fifth or sixth time he ducked.

"It was a lot further away from me a minute ago," he said, pointing up. The awning was fairly low-hanging, just a bit taller than his new height. For a moment I wondered what it would be like to be Marco; he'd probably never had to worry about banging his head on everyday objects.

"Well, try not to be so obvious. If you're going to be twitchy, you'll give us away."

"Yeah, yeah. You and Cassie better get a move out. It's almost been ten minutes."

I turned to Cassie to see if she was ready. She sat on a curb waiting for me, staring at her legs stretched out in front of her. Her new body had long, lean legs and almost impossibly fair skin. "Going to be able to walk on those?" I asked, trying to sound joking.

She hopped up and walked ahead of me without saying a word.

I caught up to her at the crosswalk. "Hey, what's wrong?"

"Nothing." She shrugged, then seemed to notice her long brown hair for the first time. "It's just...it's just strange." She played with her hair, pulled a large hank of it over her shoulder to braid. "I used to wish I could have hair like this."

I feel uncomfortably silent next to her. "I like your hair. Your real hair."

She dropped her braid and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I know. Look, forget I said anything. It's just kind of strange to...to look like this, that's all. I'll get over it."

"Why didn't you pick someone...um..."

"Black?" She shrugged. "There's not exactly a ton of us in this town. It was this girl or a guy, and _that_ would have been even stranger."

The crosswalk sign changed, and we dropped the subject in favor of walking across the street. I moved a bit ahead of her so it didn't look like we were coming in together. Before I hit the parkinglot, I saw Rachel in the window, relaxed and sipping her coffee. She caught my eye as I approached, but gave no other sign that she recognized me.

Once inside, Cassie and I split up. I headed straight for the closet and the hidden entrance, while she went to the counter and struck up a conversation with the waiter. I hesitated, unwilling to leave her and Rachel alone while I went on ahead. But just for a moment.

The closet was unlocked, and I inspected the wall with the hidden door. I couldn't be sure if the closet room had a camera as well, so I didn't want to look too confused and fumbling. For a moment I thought there'd be no help for it, and then I saw it from the corner of my eye. A sign on the wall by the door, a standard affair reminding employees of some safety rule, hung crookedly. The wall around it had scratch marks, as if the sign had been moved a lot. I shoved the sign and it swiveled out of the way, revealing a blank black pad. I placed my fingers on the pad, then my whole palm, and the pad turned red. I tensed, waiting for an alarm to follow. Instead, the secret wall swung open.

Right. Aliens. Even their lights down in the pool were red. It probably meant something positive to them.

As I waited for my heartbeat to slow down, or just stalled, the door to the closet opened and slammed into me. "Hey! Watch it."

"Sorry." Cassie squeezed into the closet and shut the door behind her.

"You were supposed to wait until I came back."

"I didn't have a choice. The waiter recognized me. He said I could just go on back without going through the 'song and dance,' and...well, I couldn't think of a good reason not to."

"Alright, alright. It's not a big deal. Just follow me."

We headed down the stairs together. I set a pace just sort of running. Perhaps if I went fast, I wouldn't have a chance to second-guess myself, to change my mind and lead Cassie and the others far, far away from this pit. Cassie kept her hand on my arm as we descended.

The bottom of the stairs came up quicker than I expected, and I slowed us down at the final turn so we wouldn't make a scene entering. Cassie's hand on my arm tightened as she saw the pool for the first time, but she didn't make a sound.

It was just as I remembered it. The colored lights, the bustle and activity, the cages, the air of purpose and industry. I turned to the left after barely sparing a glance, and Cassie followed close behind me. We both kept our heads down and avoided making eye contact with anyone.

The plan had been for me to make a brief run at the place, find areas where the others could observe without looking suspicious, and then run back to get them and give out assignments. I figured I could find a spot for Cassie before I went up top again and crossed my fingers, hoping that our two morphs wouldn't look suspicious together. We hurried along, sticking side-by-side, keeping close to the wall.

{There's a cafeteria,} Cassie told me silently.

I jumped a little, even though we had planned to communicate that way. No one around me seemed to notice, so I looked where Cassie indicated. There were, indeed, several tables set up with people eating. As we watched, two humans approached the area and stood in a line that disappeared through a door. Other people returned through an identical door, carrying trays.

{I'll stay there until you and others get back. How much trouble can I get in just eating dinner?}

{You might eat something alien,} I pointed out.

Cassie replied not with a thought, but with a pure impression of exasperation. I couldn't tell if she'd done it on purpose or not, but I still understood her loud and clear.

{Alright. Just don't go anywhere else. And don't sit with anyone. They might know 'you' and want to talk shop.}

{I'll be fine. Go.} She turned away before I could answer, all without once looking at me or giving any indication that we'd been talking.

I continued on, noting everything around me. There didn't seem to be a great deal of oversight, and very few of the sections were closed off or guarded. I wound through a group of warehouses, all with walls made from chicken wire, and no one stopped me. I got lost for a short time in the maze of prefab offices and saw a couple of empty ones. I even stopped for a few moments in a lounge area and played with my phone, without once running into anyone who asked what I was doing or where I should be.

When I felt confident that no one was watching more or cared what I did, I headed back for the stairs. Back at Mel's, I used thought speak to tell the others how to get in, then waited for them at the first turn in the stairs.

"Where's Cassie?" Rachel asked as she arrived. "I saw her follow you in."

"Slight change in plans. She's already in position. They don't seem to be keeping good track of people down there, but just in case-"

"We know, Jake." Marco rolled his eyes as he cut me off. "There's really not that many ways to say 'constant communication' and 'hide from suspicious stuff.'"

I smacked him lightly on the arm for being annoying, then let the subject drop. Then I explained to everyone where they should go so that we could split up as soon as we left the stairs. Marco would head for the warehouses. I'd seen people wandering around them with clipboards; with any luck he could blend in and see what kind of supplies they had. Tobias would go to the lounge and sit with his notebook. He'd be able to see most of the pool and take map-making notes from there. Rachel would take a niche near the cages, in the area that Tobias couldn't see, and do the same. Ax would follow me to one of the empty offices I'd seen and try his luck with the Yeerk computers.

We split up as planned and I walked with Ax over to the offices.

{This is unlike anything I've heard about,} Ax assured me. Through his thoughts, I caught an edge of earnestness, an almost juvenile need to save face and still be right. A moment later he sent me an impression of a real Yeerk Pool Ship. Our enemy normally built in concentric rings, with the Pool in the center and administration and supply circling it, rather than clusters like we saw currently.

{Why the change here?}

{I...I don't know. It could just be the constraints of having a land-based Pool.}

I didn't answer. If he didn't know, he didn't know, and I preferred to deal with what was actually present.

{Of course, if they have changed their operating procedures this much, there's no telling what else they might have changed. I'm sure their basic cultural structures are-}

{Drop it. We'll figure out what we need. You don't need to make excuses for not being omniscient.}

I sped up to get ahead of him to cut off the conversation, even though that would hardly be a barrier on thought-speak. He picked up on the hint, and we made the rest of the trip in silence.

We ducked into the first empty office we found. It was an exact replica of the others on that row: a single desk, two chairs, no door, and a strange black box that I hoped would be important. It was shaped like a rectangle with one corner cut off, presenting an angled face to whoever sat behind the desk. Ax got to work while I stood in the door, blocking the view and keeping an eye out. I leaned against the door frame and snagged what looked like a company memo off the wall to look occupied. It was written in an alien alphabet, but I pretended to read it anyway.

{What am I looking for?} Ax asked behind me.

I nodded to a passerby who waved cheerfully at me. {I don't know. Probably anything would help at this point.} I doubted they'd have a file labeled "Our Invasion Plan in 500 Words or Less," so short of that, it was all Greek to me.

{I don't have access to much without special permissions.}

{Can you find a schedule for those little ships you were talking about?}

He didn't answer, and I risked a look behind me. He had his hands on either side of the box, moving them along the surface. I couldn't tell if he felt buttons there or if it operated by some other method.

{I found them, but the departure locations appear have code names.}

{Better than nothing. What else can you get to?}

Ax kept repeating that it wasn't much. The computer recognized his morph, but whoever he'd copied, that person didn't have access to administration stuff. He got general announcements, what amounted to a public bulletin board, and some routine forms that could be filled out and sent elsewhere. Ax managed to download all of them to a small disk like the one I'd seen at Chuck-E-Cheese.

{J-ke-}

My head shot up and I looked around for the source of that half-heard thought, but of course it wasn't anywhere nearby. Whoever was talking to me had to be at the edge of their range, because I couldn't even tell the speaker.

"Stay here," I said to Ax, thoughtlessly speaking out loud. I set off, trying to hurry without being obvious about it. Perhaps the walls were blocking things?

Once I got out of the office area, I looked around again, but the space was too big to really take in details at a glance. {Everyone check in.}

I got replies from Ax, Marco, and Rachel right away, but silence from Tobias and Cassie.

{Cassie?} I put as much force into the call as I dared, still not sure of my ability to keep it private.

Nothing.

{Who saw her last?}

Rachel sent a generally negative feeling, but Marco replied. {Uh, I wasn't really looking for her new self, you know?}

I cursed to myself and scanned the Pool again. Still no sign. {Alright, let's go.}

We _had_ planned for this, after all. We would search for her as unobtrusively as possible, each person in their respective areas. All except for me; I would make a circuit of the entire Pool.

As I walked, I noticed everything except Cassie. I noticed the tell-tale bulges under jackets that indicated hidden weapons, the distressing frequency of Hork-Bajir, every strange piece of alien tech that might be a camera or worse. Every so often, I would call out for Cassie or Tobias and cross my mental fingers while I waited for a reply.

As I approached one of the tunnels, I tried again.

{Jake!}

I almost staggered from relief. {Tobias! Where are you?}

{On one of these trains. Cassie got on and - she - fine -}

I lost him and ran to the edge of the tunnel, trying to get closer, but it was no use. Whatever train he was on ran faster than I did. I looked around frantically and saw a small group of people gathered inside a green box painted on the floor. Waiting for another train?

{Who can hear me?} I called.

Marco answered. {I can.}

{Relay to the others. Cassie and Tobias got on a train. Not sure why. I'm going to follow them. Everyone else get upstairs and rally at the SP.}

{Who at the what?}

{Go to where we started from and wait there.}

{Sure you don't want backup?}

{Yes, I'm sure!} Half our group was about to fly off to god-knows-where. The last thing we needed was to have everyone in the same danger. {Get out. I'll call you when we're topside again.} I tried to inject as much confidence in that promise as I could.

Marco promised, and he relayed replies from the other two. I joined the group in the green box. A few minutes later, a bullet-shaped train arrived, and we all climbed aboard. The interior had no seats, just various loops hanging from the ceiling that passengers could hold onto. I headed for a man who's open jacket revealed a gun, snugly holstered under his arm. I didn't trust myself to steal it covertly, but if the shit hit the fan, I wanted to be close enough to steal it overtly.

The train took off like a shot. I was the only one to stumble. My gun-toting companion chuckled as I found my footing again. "First time?" he asked.

"Close enough to it," I said. How was I to know if Cleever had ever ridden this train?

"They keep saying we don't need seats for a two-minute trip, but it'd certainly keep these bodies from falling over, eh?"

I shrugged. Actually, for such a short trip, I agreed with the nebulous 'they.'

"What takes you out to Seaside?"

I froze, searching for an answer. Seaside was a town half an hour from Mel's, not two minutes. How fast was this train? "Just meeting someone," I settled on, finally.

"Odd place for a social call."

"Didn't say it was social." I matched my comment with as clear a 'shut up' look as I could muster. The held up one hand to signal that he would back off, then turned to talk to the passenger next to him.

What could the Yeerks possibly want in Seaside? The sleepy little suburb sat halfway between the base and my hometown. It had a few decent beaches, but that was all I remembered about it. I wracked my brain for a moment, then gave up. There would be time enough to figure that out when I got Cassie back. And Tobias.

We arrived, as promised, just a couple minutes later. As the train pulled in and the passengers got bottlenecked at the door, I called out to the others. {I'm here. Are you guys okay?}

I got an answer from Tobias. It wasn't in the form I expected. Instead of using words, Tobias slammed me with the full weight of knowledge, like a full report in memory form, dumped directly into my brain. I _knew_ that Cassie had been made, that she was cornered in this new place. I knew that Cassie and Tobias were talking silently, that he was distracting the search team away from her hiding place. More than that, I _remembered_ searching for her, remembered the feelings of panic at finding out the truth, remembered scrambling to come up with a lie that wouldn't make things worse. Only I hadn't done any of that.

I had to process that for a moment. It took several seconds before I realized no one was getting off the train.

"What's the hold-up?" someone called.

"Security breach. They aren't letting anyone out."

Beside me, the gunman muttered under his breath and started to shove his way forward. I followed in his wake. "Out of the way, come on, move it." He reached the open train doors, only to be met with two other humans blocking his way. He held up what looked like a police badge, if those came shaped like pink diamonds. "What's the problem?"

"Had someone try and make an unauthorized entry to the bay. We think it's one of those pacifist nuts. Apparently they don't think 'peace' applies to us; they took out half the grid and then dropped off. No one in or out until we find them. Even you, sub-visser."

I repeated everything I'd heard to Tobias, who sent it further out to Cassie.

{She says she was trying to find an exit and tripped an alarm. Doesn't know anything about a grid.}

{Do they know what she looks like?}

He paused, waiting for an answer. {Yes. Well, generally, at least. She doesn't think they got a _good_ look at her.}

I frowned and scrapped my half-formed plan of claiming to be the 'nut' and leading away the chase.

{I'm running out of ways to lie to these guys. Got any plans?} Though Tobias tried to sound calm, he wasn't practiced enough at thought-speak to manage it. Instead, I _knew_ quite clearly that he was forcibly trying, that the people around him were suspicious, that we'd all be fucked in a matter of moments.

I had to act now, but the only plan I had was crazy. Crazy and reckless and very likely to get someone killed. Then again, doing nothing was guaranteed to get Cassie killed.

I glanced around to be sure that no one was watching me. They all looked out the door, craning their heads to try and see some of the supposed action. I couldn't be sure if any of them would recognize Cleever, or if his face had been caught on camera already, but still I began to demorph. Not all the way, not to the point of being recognized, but just enough to change my face into mush. With any luck, either Cleever wouldn't be ID-ed or I'd be pegged as an Andalite.

Quick as I could, I rammed into the sub-visser's back, then jerked him sideways as we fell out the door. My hand slipped under his jacket and closed on the butt of the gun. As he fell, I yanked the weapon free and brought it to bear on the two guards. "Drop your weapons. Drop 'em on the ground, now!"

Both of them had their guns in holsters, so I had the drop on them easily. Very slowly, so as not to set me off, they did as I commanded.

"Now get back in the train." I kicked the man I'd knocked over. "Take this guy with you."

They did that as well, and one of them dragged the dazed sub-visser along. The unburdened guard started talking into his wristwatch, so I knew I didn't have much time. I looked for a way to close the train doors, but as soon as the guards stopped blocking the way, the doors closed on their own.

I grabbed the two dropped guns and bolted. I had no idea where I was going or where to find an exit. I heard shouts ahead of me and pursuers behind me, but none of that mattered.

These people needed an enemy to chase. I was willing to give it to them.

000000

A/N: OMG, yes, it's an update after more than a year! I have no excuse for my absence. I wish I did, because then I could explain to myself why I stopped writing anything - not just fanfic - for so long. Please bear with me as I dust off my skills and try to get back into this. Updates may not be as quick as you'd like, but I'll do my level best not to wait another year.


	15. Chapter 15

I ran blind. Around every turn, I shot my stolen weapon at the ceiling to make people duck and get out of my way. I didn't dare point it at anyone, not with my mad, uncontrolled dash through the place. Most of those I ran into stayed out of my way, but I had a pursuit hot on my tail.

I barely had any time to take stock of my surroundings. If I was underground still, the Yeerks had done a remarkably good job building the place up. It looked like the ground floor of an office building, with a large lobby and a series of hallways and lounges and conference rooms. I found a bank of glass doors that lead outside and shied away from them. I couldn't head out until I found Cassie, until I was sure that _everyone_ was chasing me instead of her.

Tobias's memory-dump told me she was in some deep part of this building, in what looked like a factory floor, but he'd been lost before he found her. I couldn't follow his vague memories to them, so I settled for barreling toward anything that looked 'inside.'

A shout ahead of me warned me that I was about to be cut off. I kicked in an office door and ducked inside just as three Yeerks ran into my hallway. They saw the open door, so there was no hiding where I'd gone, no running back the way I'd come. My new hiding spot came with an occupant, a young man who looked scared witless but still came at me with his keyboard raised over his head.

Dispatching the man was almost laughably easy. I tore the board out of his hand and threw him into the hall. He crashed into my pursuers, which gave me enough time to slam the door shut and wedge a chair under the handle.

I wasn't completely locked in, though. My job usually consisted of smashing in through doors, but like most of my army peers, I'd devoted a large amount of time and thought to the problem of getting into and out of buildings. Not always for professional reasons. When I jumped up on the desk, removed a panel from the ceiling, and hauled myself into the crawl space, I knew just where to go to avoid crashing to the ground again. The trick, as I'd learned one late night breaking into my locked barracks room, was to crawl along the tops of the walls.

The Yeerks broke into the office just after I'd replaced the ceiling tile. One of my unseen pursuers cursed fluently in English before giving out orders in an alien tongue. The only word I caught was 'Andalite.'

After the people below had dispersed, I started crawling along, weaving my way through studs and wires and cables as quietly as I could. I lifted up ceiling panels to peek into the offices I passed, until I found an empty one to fall into. I brushed the dust and grime off my clothes as best I could, hid my stolen guns under my shirt, and walked calmly out into the hall.

Without an immediate threat behind me, I could take better stock of my surroundings and paid attention to the signs. They were all emblazoned with the logo of a local electric company. I quite suddenly remembered the high-voltage power lines that traveled along the highway near Seaside, and the enormous distribution substation. Power for the whole county came in through those lines. This office building wasn't near that substation, but then again, it didn't have to be.

Had Cassie somehow managed to knock out our power grid?

{Tobias, Cassie, where are you?}

I got a barrage of impressions from both of them. Cassie's came along with shock and disbelief that I'd come at all, and the clear idea that I should have kept myself out of harm. She was wedged into a tiny corner behind a huge generator, with no option except hiding. Tobias stuck with a group of Yeerks who searched for her, and they'd come dangerously close to Cassie's hiding spot.

I followed the signs and my information from the other two until I found a set of doors warning me of high voltage. I knelt down and cracked the door open to sneak a look inside, and when I didn't see anyone, I slipped through the crack.

{Alright, Tobias, lead them over here.} I sent him an image of my general area. I was in a massive room filled with enormous, half-dome shaped objects that blocked my view, but my corner had what looked like a security guard's desk by it.

A few moments later, he replied. {They won't go. We've already been there, and I think they're getting sick of me.}

I had very little idea of what equipment was around me. It looked like emergency generators, which put it far and away outside my expertise. I searched for something that looked safe to break and finally settled on ripping an access panel off the structure nearest me and slammed it against some metal piping.

{Okay, yeah, that got their attention.}

I heard shouts from across the room and scrambled to get out of sight. The generators offered plenty of nooks and crannies, and I managed to squeeze myself between two pipes and end up in a corridor through rows of equipment.

{They saw you,} Tobias warned. {Run.}

{Fall back.}

{What?}

{Fall back. I'll circle around and meet you back by where you were.}

I still couldn't see Tobias, which made trying to coordinate distracting. It took an effort to think of something other than 'over there' and dodge around machines at the same time. I slowed down a fraction and a few Yeerks caught up to me. "Over here!"

I risked a glance back and saw two of my chasers had weapons drawn, but neither of them fired. Likely thanks to the massive dangerous equipment all around us.

"You idiots! Stun him!"

I found a wide space between two machines and dodged sideways just as a blast of...something went past me. Whatever it was bounced off the generator casing with an audible ping.

These guns had a stun setting?

I didn't have time to check as I wriggled my way free and into another corridor.

{Jake!} Cassie's thought-voice sounded close by, close enough that I looked around for her, but it was only an illusion. {They've got all the doors blocked off. We're stuck in this room.}

I raced around a corner and nearly ran into Tobias. He had to steady me to keep us from crashing to the floor, and for a moment I got ready to throw him off me. I didn't immediately recognize his new, morphed appearance.

I pulled out one of the guns and pressed it into Tobias's hands. He looked shocked and refused to hold it. "Jake, I can't- I've never-"

"Find Cassie. Get to an exterior door. Tell me when you get there."

"I can't use a gun."

"Shoot over people's heads. You don't have to hit them. Just get to an outside door and _wait there_, okay?"

Someone raced around the corner, and I punched Tobias as lightly as I dared. It still had enough force to knock him backward, and I let the gun 'slip' out of my hand before I turned to run. Tobias had slammed into the lead chaser, either by providence or his own design, and I heard the man yelling at him as I slipped away.

I paused just long enough to tell Cassie the same thing I'd told Tobias.

I had the attention of the whole room, now. I could hear people shouting to their comrades, all trying to coordinate at the top of their lungs. It helped me figure out exactly how they planned to hem me in. After I got confirmation that Tobias and Cassie were together and not being chased, I stopped running and started climbing up the side of a generator. All the warning signs told me I'd probably fry for this, but I ignored them.

I'd started off running around randomly, but the layout of the room wasn't hard to figure, especially since all the machines were identical. It was easy enough to trick them into chasing me down the wrong corridor, so when I reached the top of my chose generator, I saw a line of Yeerks running by on the other side.

I still had one gun left, one I'd taken from the train guards. Unlike the one I'd stolen in the woods, this one looked exactly like a .40 Glock. I tried to pull out the magazine to check my ammo but found it wouldn't come loose. On closer inspection, the safety switch proved to have four settings, instead of the normal 'safe/unsafe.' None were labeled. As the Yeerks below me ran past, I thumbed the switch to what should have been 'safe' and fired at the ground.

Again, the complete lack of kickback surprised me. The weapon effortlessly burned a hole in the concrete floor, all without any sort of visible laser or projectile. The Yeerks started shouting orders while I moved the clearly-not-safe switch back one more notch. This time, my shot produced a dull _crack_ sound, but no other noticeable effect.

The Yeerks were backtracking and had almost reached my spot, though they still didn't look up. I took a risk and aimed at the lower leg of the lead runner. The man dropped to the floor and twitched a few times, as if I'd hit him with a taser, then went limp.

I fervently hoped that 'stun' didn't leave lasting damage, but I didn't have a chance to make sure. As soon as the first man fell, the others noticed my vantage point and sounded the alarm. I shot at two more, and only hit one, before they brought their own weapons to bear and forced me to duck.

{Jake, we're in place.} Tobias's assurance came while I was still trying to climb down to a sure perch. {Now what?}

{Now don't get shot. I'm going to try and get rid of these guys.}

{Don't be crazy!} Cassie nearly overwhelmed me with fear. {Just get over here. We'll run for it.}

{You said the door was blocked.}

{It is, but there's fewer guys over here than in there.}

{Good. If I go down, you two try it.}

{Jake!}

{Stop distracting me; I'm trying to hide.}

She kept quiet after that, but I could feel her seething frustration and fear still being directed my way.

I jumped from one generator to the next, crossing the corridor between instead of wasting time with climbing down. I ran along the top so that my pursuers could get a good look at me, then when they fired off the first few shots, I dropped down on the opposite side again. I peeked over the top and counted four men and two women in the opposite corridor, all congregating briefly before one woman directed them to go different ways. When the corridor cleared and everyone went in my supposed direction of escape, I climbed back over and dropped into the now-empty corridor.

I couldn't keep letting them chase me forever. Already I could feel my body start to wear down. Adrenaline kept me going, but it wouldn't keep me from making clumsy, stupid mistakes once my body ran out of 'real' energy. I crept to the end of my corridor, checked for any enemy, and headed for an inside door.

I had one chance at this, and I didn't allow myself to think about it going wrong. Nothing _could_ go wrong. I didn't have the luxury of going wrong. This would work because I simply didn't have any other option. I raced at the door before logic could catch up to me.

I dropped into a crouch and hit the door like a player sliding into home base, one hand out to catch the handle. The door slammed open, and the Yeerks outside pointed their guns at chest level, but I was on the floor. I shot the closest one, kicked the legs out from under another, then launched myself back into the generator room.

The two remaining guards followed me in. I ran straight for the isle where I thought my previous 'friends' would be, towing irate pursuers behind me. At the last moment, as I turned a corner, I ducked between two pipes and out of sight. The two groups of Yeerks met and opened fire on each other in a panic.

I slipped free of the pipes and ran for Cassie and Tobias. As I hurled around the last corner, I came face-to-face with the barrel of a handgun and raised my own weapon in response. A fraction of a second later, I recognized Cassie behind the gun. The real Cassie, my Cassie, and she didn't look inclined to drop her stance.

Tobias grabbed her hand and yanked her aim away from me. "That's Jake."

Belatedly, I remembered that my face was still not my own. Cassie caught on faster than I did and dropped her gun like a hot coal. I winced as it hit the floor but didn't have a chance to say anything before Cassie threw her arms around my neck. "Stupid, stupid idiot," she told me. I could feel tears where her face pressed against my neck.

I dropped my guard, just for a moment, to hug her back. She felt warm and solid and safe against me, even though we were all anything but safe. A shout from the Yeerks called me back to the present a moment later, and I pulled Cassie off me. "What happened? Why aren't you morphed?"

"They found me," Cassie replied.

"And?"

"And what? And I couldn't let them keep thinking I was Taylor." At my blank look, she explained, "The girl I copied."

"Cassie, if you don't go back, they're going to know you're _you_."

"Well better me than her!"

I recognized the mulish set to her jaw, which wasn't entirely overshadowed by her wide-eyed fear. I might win this argument, but I wouldn't win it in the next thirty seconds. Instead, I took a quick stock of our situation. We were huddled at an emergency exit on one of the short walls, so it was unlikely there would be another door in sight once we got outside. I turned to Tobias and nodded at the small, narrow window set in the door.

"Looked outside?"

"Yeah. Four guys. They look bored, but they peak in every few minutes."

Bored worked in my favor. I took the gun from Cassie and handed it to Tobias. "You stay hidden until it's clear."

"No way. I can-"

"Either you morph or you don't let anyone see your face."

She glared at me, but she didn't make any move to turn into Taylor again. I'd half-hoped that would convince her to disguise herself, but when it didn't, I had to switch my focus to Tobias.

"Alright, I'll-"

"Jake, _I can't shoot people_."

I stamped down the urge to just outright strangle the guy. I'd forgotten how difficult it was to work with civilians, how they objected to every little thing. I wasn't being fair to Tobias in getting angry at him, but then again, there were a dozen homicidal aliens in the room with us. We didn't have time for fair.

"Fine. Don't shoot them. I don't care. Just bust out that door and fire the gun. Yell, curse, make mean faces, just scare the shit out of them, okay? Make them keep their heads down. Can you do _that_?"

He nodded mutely, and I put my hand on the door, ready to force it open. "On second thought, don't shout. Just hit whatever you can. I'll come out right behind you. As soon as I'm out, run for the nearest cover, then yell when you make it there."

I slammed my weight into the door and sent it flying open, felt it run into someone on other side. Tobias jumped out like a man possessed, flailing sloppily, firing in every direction but straight in front of him. It worked, as I heard the Yeerks outside yell at each other to get down.

I followed Tobias out the door and he dropped the gun to run. I swung around the door and took up firing, not trying to hit anyone, just keeping their heads down. They had hastily turned over a patio table and huddled behind it, and I fired at anything that stuck out.

{Jake! I'm set!}

I risked a glance backward and saw a dumpster. I almost asked Tobias to lay down cover fire for me, but he'd dropped his gun. With my weapon still up, I picked up the dropped weapon and crept backward until I could reach the dumpster as well. In the slight lull, one of the guards dared to stick his head up. He went down jerking after I shot him.

Tobias crouched there, peaking around the edge, and I shoved him backward and fully behind cover. "Alright, now we're going to ambush them. Take the gun," I put it back in his hands, ignoring how hard they shook, "and just do what you did before. Just fire at the table or the wall or whatever you want. Just make them scared to stand up. And whatever you do, _don't shoot me_, okay? I'm going to go around the side. When I get in place, I'll yell 'shift,' and that means _don't shoot me_ because I'm getting close. Can you handle that?"

"Yeah. Don't shoot you. I think I can do that."

I didn't have enough time to belittle the 'think' comment. We had maybe a minute before reinforcements showed up, assuming the Yeerks called it in as soon as we came out the door. After Tobias started blatantly shooting at the wall, I prayed that would work well enough and ran out.

The guards behind the table stayed with their heads down, so they didn't see me run out from behind the dumpster. I made a short arc away from the building, until I could see the enemy clearly, then I approached at speed. I called out a mental warning to Tobias, but he didn't have any further over to shift. Only two guards were left in the fight, and I dispatched them with two quick shots.

{Cassie, get out here. Tobias, quit shooting and come help me.} I'd run up on the unconscious guards before I finished talking, and the other two joined me soon after. I got them to help me move the guards into the dumpster, and for once they didn't complain about the task. Luckily, there were only a few bags of trash in the dumpster, and they seemed to be mostly paper. I jumped in after the last guard.

"Jake, what are you doing?" Cassie asked.

"Hiding. Get in."

"But-"

"_Get in_."

We heard shouts from around the corner, and that silenced any further complaints. The other two scrambled into the dumpster just as the guards' reinforcements arrived.

The whole fight and body-movement had taken, by my estimation, a little over two minutes. Abysmal response time, assuming the other doors also had guards. As we listened to the Yeerks outside search, I tried to reason out their tactics. If they were unprepared because they didn't expect an attack from within, then we couldn't count on similar slow lag times in the future. They would learn, after all, and probably at the worst possible moment for us. If they had a command issue, if it was just logistics or a matter of training, all of that was correctable. If they had more ground to cover than they did troops, that worked better in our favor, but then why stick four guards on one door?

I kept my gun out and trained on the opening of the dumpster, but the Yeerks outside never thought to look in. An argument in favor of poor training. After a brief argument in some foreign language, the Yeerks left.

"How do we get out of here?" Tobias whispered.

"We morph the guards, take their clothes, and then walk out the front door."

"Jake, what if we get caught?"

I shrugged off Cassie's question. "Then they'll find the naked guards in the dumpster when they wake up and know these guys didn't really do anything. Now let's hurry. I'm not really sure how long they stay knocked out for."

One of the men with us started moaning slightly, and Cassie put a hand on his cheek. He quieted down right away; probably thanks to the side-effects of acquisition. Cassie blushed a deep red and refused to meet my eyes, but I didn't care so long as it meant she'd go along with the plan. She could feel bad about it later, when she was alive and safe inside her own home.

Tobias and I made the change first, then we crawled out and let Cassie do so in private. She joined us a minute later still fumbling with her pants. Or...his pants.

"Okay, let's just get out of here." Under the deep, masculine voice, I could still hear Cassie's usual tone for uncomfortable situations.

I led the way around the building, checking every corner for other Yeerks. I doubted we'd have to fight any we ran across, but I didn't want to have to come up with a convincing lie that might not work. Every few feet, Cassie would stop to readjust her clothes, until finally I snapped.

"Just leave it. What's wrong with you?"

"I'm not used to having extra parts!"

"Well...um...pretend better. Someone's going to think you've gone crazy with all that twitching." I hadn't considered Cassie's...inexperience, and I turned to the front again to hide a slight blush.

Tobias was the one that found the employee parking lot, on the other side of an alleyway that cut through the building complex. He had his guard's keys in his pocket, and we searched through the parking lot for the right car. I waited for Cassie to say something about grand theft auto, but she seemed more interested in getting somewhere private and demorphing. Or, more likely, just didn't care about objects as much as people. She'd never been a material type.

When we finally found the right car, we all piled in, held our breath going past the empty parking attendant shack, and then Tobias sped for the highway.


End file.
